14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo has finally remembered to update everyone on its latest developments for Yahoo Mail. As noted yesterday, Yahoo Mail got support for the OAuth authentication protocol a couple of weeks back, but Yahoo hadn't made any official announcement. This has been now rectified and there are even a couple of new details to make up for the lapse.
"We're super excited to announce that the Yahoo! Mail API now allows Read and Read+Write access to full message contents for any type of user. We've added these expanded scopes — we've been allowing message-header access for years — so that the hundreds of millions of users who entrust their data to us can have the freedom to use it in whichever context is most useful to them," Mark Risher and Michael Curtis from Yahoo! Mail Product and Engineering wrote.
The big change here is that developers now get access to the entire email, a potential risk, but also a great opportunity for some interesting, new tools. This should make it a lot easier to get your emails from all manners of apps or sites without having to visit the Yahoo Mail website.
Access to the email account will also be significantly safer thanks to the new OAuth protocol that Yahoo Mail now supports. This allows third-party websites and apps to access one's account without the user having to disclose their account credentials. It also enables them to take away access rights to any third-party with relative ease. Yahoo Mail is the biggest email provider in the world, and by a significant margin, catering to several hundreds of millions of users.
"The API has also been ported to OAuth, providing a much cleaner token model, better authentication UI, and more fine-grained management for developers. We'll continue to support Browser-Based Auth for legacy developers, but its use is deprecated. We recommend that anyone starting a new project choose OAuth," the two explained.