Yahoo! Mail Google Gadget
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.
October 22nd, 2007 at 1:49 pm
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
November 2nd, 2007 at 12:56 pm
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
November 6th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
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.
November 12th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
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
November 15th, 2007 at 9:09 am
Eric…yeah, actually. A little busy right now, but let me see if I can do it over the weekend.
November 19th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
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!
November 20th, 2007 at 12:19 am
Got jammed up, I’ll definitely get to it during the Thanksgiving break, though. Sit tight.
November 26th, 2007 at 11:19 pm
The source is now available.
November 27th, 2007 at 4:20 am
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)
November 28th, 2007 at 7:49 am
Thanks for the source! Is there any way to add this gadget to Google desktop?
Thanks!
November 28th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
Well, it’s just a Gadget…so I don’t see why not. I’ll look into it.
December 23rd, 2007 at 3:26 pm
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?
December 23rd, 2007 at 3:28 pm
Never mind, just found it. DOH.
March 28th, 2008 at 2:55 am
Just curious, is there anyway i can get this gadget installed on my desktop?
March 28th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
I think it should work with Google Desktop, but I’ve never tried myself.