The mysterious behavior of Mac Mail and Yahoo! Mail Plus

If you, like me, uses Mac Mail as your primary email client and you also have an Yahoo! Mail Plus subscription (which gives you IMAP access to your Yahoo Mail account), you may have experienced an intermittent connection behavior where the email client is not able to connect due an invalid password even though you're using the correct one.

I've been reading lots of blog posts and forums reporting the exact same behavior and I was not able to find a concrete answer but the following approach seems to be working for me so far.

So, next time you see that dialog box requesting that you enter your password again to login to Yahoo, go to your web browser of choice and navigate to Yahoo Mail (mail.yahoo.com).

If you are automatically logged into the system then make sure you click on the Sign Out button first.

When you return to the login screen, type your username and password normally but make sure you select the Keep Me Signed In checkbox and then click Sign In. That should solve the problem.

Have fun...

How to Configure GMail's filters to Move Messages from Your Inbox

I've been using GMail for almost a month now and honestly I really liked. It's really fast and has lots of good features and extensions.

One of the things I was not really sure I was getting everything out of it was Filters. GMail's Filters allow you to manage the flow of incoming messages where you can automatically label, delete, forward, etc.
As much as I like the label feature where you visually see what "category" the message belongs to I was not able to manage that properly and since I'm now on paternity leave my inbox started flooding once I could not keep up with the tons of emails I get subscribing to many mailing lists as they all show up on my Inbox.

So, how can you apply the filters feature to move messages to other folders automatically? Where is the magic button? Actually, there is no magic button but a magic checkbox on the filter setting.

When you create a new filter, you first select the search criteria (from, to, etc) and then you choose the action you want to take for that message category.

The first option on the Choose Action panel is Skip the Inbox (Archive It) and that's the missing part here. Check that checkbox.
Now you just have to tell GMail where to move those messages. Check the Apply the label checkbox and then select the label you want.

That will give you exactly the Move To behavior and your Inbox will be much cleaner.