Someone at work mentioned that their friend left Yahoo! Mail to switch to Gmail because Gmail has an iGoogle gadget. I think this is a pretty lame reason to choose one webmail over another, since the presence of a gadget/widget doesn’t make the webmail any better…but I digress.
At first I offered to lend my copious expertise with the Yahoo! Mail Web Service to anyone who wished to build a Yahoo! Mail gadget themselves. Then I realized, who’s better qualified to give it a go than me? So I wrote a Yahoo! Mail Google Gadget. Gadgets are funny things…building a gadget is a little awkward. I’m guessing a lot of that had to do with trying to get Yahoo! Browser Based Authentication working with it (I still can’t believe it works as well as it does).
Speaking of BBAuth, I think my gadget is the only Yahoo! Mail gadget that doesn’t either iframe in the mobile version of Yahoo! Mail or ask you directly for your username and password. When you log in, I open a separate window (that closes itself later) and send you to Yahoo! to log in. No screen scraping or other wonkiness involved (ahem…Facebook, Plaxo and all you other pricks).
Anyway, if you happen to be an iGoogle or Google Desktop (or whatever other Google product you can think of that will let you embed a gadget) user and want to be able to preview some of your Yahoo! Mail there, head on over and install my gadget.
Feel free to leave bug reports in the comments. I haven’t kicked the tires extensively.
I just wish it was available as a gadget personal homepage. I am currently building my own, something btw my yahoo, netvibes and igoogle
The best web gadget i’ve found so far is a wap browser right inside a module. So I get the wap version of Yahoo mail on the homepage. There are other which are really not secure if you put this webpage online… they display the username and password right into the html without encryption. I wonder why Yahoo has not already aske google to put them offline
Ryan - This looks interesting. I started to set this up, but had a question about the authentication.
I got the following warnings and wondered how of my email information or other Yahoo account information was flowing through the “unclehulka.com” servers. Or put another way, what is the security risk here?
* http://ymail.unclehulka.com will not be able to access any data you keep on Yahoo! other than the data identified above.
* The permission will expire in 2 weeks.
* You can change this permission by visiting the My Account page and selecting the Partner Accounts link. Note that revoking permission may take up to 24 hours.
* If you change your password, you may be required to give permission again.
* The Yahoo! privacy policy does not apply to http://ymail.unclehulka.com; please read their privacy policy to learn more about how they treat your personal information.
* Yahoo! has no affiliation with http://ymail.unclehulka.com and cannot guarantee the security of any user data that you permit http://ymail.unclehulka.com to access.
Thanks,
Peter
It’s just pointing out that you’re giving access to your mailbox to a third party. If you trust the third party, all is good.
Would you be willing to post the php source so that I can host this on my own site, rather than having to trust you? No offense
Eric…yeah, actually. A little busy right now, but let me see if I can do it over the weekend.
I would love to have the source as well for the above noted reasons. I was just looking into writing this myself and stumbled upon yours! No need to reinvent the wheel!
Thanks!
Got jammed up, I’ll definitely get to it during the Thanksgiving break, though. Sit tight.
The source is now available.
your src links need http:// added to them. anyway, I did the download and got everything installed but BBAuth does not loop me back to iGoogle. It just takes me back to the index.php where I have the gadget hosted. A few more instructions would be helpful on where exactly you need to update links, id’s, etc…
Thanks. This application is great (I tried it at unclehulka)
Thanks for the source! Is there any way to add this gadget to Google desktop?
Thanks!
Well, it’s just a Gadget…so I don’t see why not. I’ll look into it.
You can change this permission by visiting the My Account page and selecting the Partner Accounts link. Note that revoking permission may take up to 24 hours.
Where is the “My Acct” page and the Partner Accounts link?
Never mind, just found it. DOH.
Just curious, is there anyway i can get this gadget installed on my desktop?
I think it should work with Google Desktop, but I’ve never tried myself.
Hi there! I found this gadget while looking for a mail checker to use with Google Desktop (as Google only offers gMail gadgets) and saw the last question.
After some more researching, it appears that iGoogle gadgets can be easily installed on GDesktop by the following method:
Copy the xml link of an iGoogle gadget (in this case, http://ymail.unclehulka.com/googlegadget/gadget.xml )
Open the “Add Gadget” search box of GDesktop, then paste the xml link to the search field, and let it search. When it’s found, just add it like any other gadget, and you’re done.
Now, would be good if yahoo would host this itself, but I guess they concentrate more on Yahoo Widgets than on Google Gadgets ..
Hi Ryan,
This is a really cool gadget! Because of the security concerns mentioned above, I’m thinking about implementing the whole functionality inside the gadget without any external servers and php modules. Do you think it is possible to do so using javascript code? I’m a newbie at iGoogle gadgets, any help is appreciated!
Thx!
Örs
It might be possible, although you’ll have a hell of a time successfully talking to the Yahoo! Mail servers that way.
Did you try the usewide gadget?
Its great. I am currently using it.
Please see this page:
http://www.usewide.com/forums/topics.aspx?ID=121&lang=en