Yahoo! Mail API is a full-featured interface to Yahoo! Mail. With it, we can build applications that display message summary information, parse message contents, manage folders, and even compose and send messages.And now it allows Read and Read+Write access to full message contents for any type of user with the power of OAuth that allows you to share your private resources stored on one site with another site without having to hand out your user name and password. OAuth is a simple, secure, and quick way to publish and access protected data (photos, videos, contact list). It's an open authorization model based primarily on existing standards that ensures secure credentials can be provisioned and verified by different software platforms. Yahoo! continue to support Browser-Based Auth for legacy developers, but its use is deprecated.

Getting Started

1. Sign up for an OAuth consumer key and secret. Three different access scopes are available: Summary info (Read Only), Full messages (Read Only), and Full message (Read-Write).

2. Grab a client library. Here are two for Python and PHP.

3. Start making calls!

References :

• Yahoo! Mail API User Guide
• Yahoo! Mail API User Guide in PDF Format
• OAuth Authorization Model
• Yahoo! Developer Network Discussion Forum