Sorta new here, I have had an acct since last October, I try to set things up and repeatedly fail, get frustrated and put this down. Before I open up a trouble ticket I thought I’d check in here for some help first. I’m looking forward to the day when I no longer have to use AOL or Yahoo mail, Runbox was recommended to me and I think its going to work for me just fine IF I can just get it going. Where I’m failing is… I was able to go into the retrieve function and successfully bring across my mail & folders from both AOL & Yahoo. BUT I cannot get Runbox to sync with either mail service such that mail is updated automatically. Without this I cannot start to wean people off of AOL or Yahoo. I cant be the first person who is trying to migrate away from AOL or Yahoo. Please help, TU
Hello. Welcome to the forum 
We don’t offer a feature that does this. You can do a one time import using IMAP Import that will bring across your mail from those services, or you can use the POP Retrieve feature that will bring across the Inbox contents on a regular basis but not your folders as POP doesn’t work for folders as such.
My recommendation would be to copy all your mail over to Runbox from the services and then set up forwarding of mail from AOL and Yahoo to your Runbox account. Then you can start to wean people off your AOL address and eventually all your email will come to Runbox.
If you need help I do suggest you open a support ticket though as we can then help you on an account specific basis. I hope that helps.
Hello Dave
TU for taking the time to help me. If I understand you correctly…
- Setting up IMAP and using it will only bring across mail and mail in folders from either AOL or Yahoo mail on a once each time manual basis, yes?
- If I set up pop mail individual emails sent to my AOL & Yahoo email accounts will automatically come across to Runbox on a regular basis, yes?
- If I read an email while in either my AOL or Yahoo mail and then while I’m still in that mail account I should move that mail to a folder in that account that email would not come across to Runbox using pop mail, is that correct?
- If I set up mail forwarding in both AOL & Yahoo and perform #3 above that email will come across in pop mail even though I may have deleted it or moved it into a folder in AOL or Yahoo, yes?
- If I set up mail forwarding in both AOL & Yahoo to Runbox does it even makes sense to setup pop mail? Is forwarding more secure than pop?
Finally (for now, ha)
In #2 above how often does pop mail synchronize?
Thanks again!
Tom
Hello Tom,
In order:
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Yes, it’s a one time only operation submitted manually in the Runbox interface. You can do it more than once, but that’s not really what you are looking for I think.
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Correct, POP only works on the Inbox (usually). The POP Retrieve interval is defined by you from a selection of ever 24 hours, 12 hours, 6 hours, 1 hour, 30 mins, 20 mins and 10 mins.
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Yes, if you move a message to another mailbox before the Runbox POP Retrieve has a chance to copy it over it would not be copied over.
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If you set up forwarding you will not need POP Retrieve as all messages to your AOL and Yahoo accounts will be forwarded by AOL and Yahoo to your Runbox account. I think this is the most reliable option but it can have some downsides in that mail is forwarded and not copies and this could possible affect how you reply to some thing, but it is worth a go I think.
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As per my comment in 4. above. The security issue is an interesting point though. It probably is as secure in terms of the mail being transferred to Runbox as they will just effectively mail a copy to your Runbox account and as long as their servers and ours choose an encryption protocol for the transfer then it is encrypted as it is transferred. If I remember correctly POP Retrieve always uses encryption for the transfer.
I hope that helps.
HI Dave
Yes it does help a lot and I much appreciate it. As luck would have it Yahoo has a notice up that they will no longer forward mail from their “free” account effective this week and AOL doesn’t even have it as an option. I guess that leaves setting up pop mail. Story of my life recently “day late and a dollar short”
Thanks for your time and help!
POP could be the way to go with this then. Just another thought though…
This may not suit you, but it should work. You could set up an email program such as Thunderbird or one that is already on your computer and get your AOL and Yahoo accounts set up on it. I would set them up as IMAP and then create a filter in the email program to move all new AOL and Yahoo email to the Runbox account. Then when replying to the emails you would be sending from your Runbox account.
It works best if you only ever use one computer to read email, but it’s a thought and eventually everyone would get used to your own address.
It would also let you copy across email to your Runbox account including anything in folders.
As I say, just a thought but it may not suit you and POP could be the answer for the things in your Inbox.
Hello Dave
I thought that would be a great idea and set out to execute it right away. Alas Yahoo has no filtering capability what’s so ever save marking an email as priority. AOL does have somewhat more filtering capabilities but packaging emails up and sending them along to anything but an existing folder on AOL is not possible, shame. Another reason to set the sun on them both, eh? I was however successful in setting up pop mail along with linking my iOS to Runbox. So as it stands from my IPad Pro i have access to AOL, Yahoo & Runbox email and can move, edit and file as desired.
Thanks for the help
Tom
Hi Tom. Sorry I wasn’t clear. I meant that the filters could be set up in the email program not at Yahoo or AOL, but it sounds like you have a solution that is working for you now anyway. Let us know if we can help further
Hello Dave
Aha I understand better what you meant now, my bad. I still think it a good idea and have started researching a service that will redirect (forward) mail. I will look into Thunderbird as you said. Although I could use an app that would run on Win 10 I would prefer an iOS app. Thanks again!
Tom L
No idea if AOL and YaHoo support this, but on my gMail account I configured it so it forwards my email to my Runbox account and deletes the message in gMail. In your case, you could do something like this for X months and then eventually delete those accounts or just keep them and let them forward email to Runbox.
Hello and thank you for your suggestion. As it so happens at Dave’s suggestion in this same thread I went ahead and loaded Thunderbird Email on a Win 10 machine and set it up to forward all of my AOL and Yahoo mail as an interim fix. It appears to be working well to place all the email in one place while I work the many people and places away from AOL and Yahoo. Ii have some fine tuning to do with the move. But I think its going to be ok. Thanks for the suggestion and help!
Tom
For additional security, if you don’t want to leave email behind when it is fetched with POP, you can ask your email provider to delete their copy when a message is fetched.
I used POP Fetch rather than IMAP import for all secondary accounts, and simply turned POP fetch off when I was finished. Avoid over-frequent POP fetches as this may cause the provider to throttle your access.
Thank you for the insights. I will have to check that I turned that feature on when I set up Thunderbird.
Regards
Tom L
If I may interject here, I’m looking for answers to questions I have unrelated to this issue, but I’m reading everything and thought I would put this out there for anyone transferring from Yahoo/Gmail/other providers. I have several yahoo & gmail accounts with my main yahoo containing over 400k emails. A lot of junk, no doubt and some things I really want to leave there so they don’t clog up my runbox account.
To start, if you’re like me and don’t have a clue about IMAP or used POP once eons ago, this might help. Maybe the way I decided to handle changing my email is the long, tedious way, but it is more tedious going through 400k+ emails for things I WANT to keep. So, the first thing I did was change my profile email addresses with all my important stuff such as bills, etc. Easy. Stops them from going to the other providers instantly. Now I can take my time to go through each folder for the important stuff and individually forward only those emails with information I absolutely need to keep. Everything else gets deleted or will sit there until I get around to deleting them all at once. This will keep the junk out of RB. And there is alot of that.
I am havinga trial run of Runbox. I cna’t understand anything on the Forum. I can’t do naything tecchie. I am already thinking Runbox is not for me -I can’t even find a spell check facility for emails. This is extremely importnat for me, Office 2007 used to ahve a good one but Office is now awful. I don’t get on with Thunderbird becasue it keeps changing everything and the message dispaly gets upset very easily. I alos find the seach function useless. I need avery simple, stable email platform that has an excellent serach finction and a very easy to use an email platform that has an email spell-checker that learns from my habitual mistakes. I have co-ordination problems that lead to an awful lot of typos, even though I know very well how to spell, my typing is becoming more and more of a disaster. Can anyone help or advise please? It took me all day to work out how to join the Forum but I still don’t know how to start a new thread. Also, in the message search there was nothing about spell check. Thanks. Should I stay or give up?
Hello. Thanks for your message and sorry for the delay in replying.
We don’t include a spell checker in the Runbox interface because browsers can do it better with their built in dictionaries that can learn common spellings you have for words specific to you (such as your name or address) and then use them across a range of websites you use.
If you don’t have a spell checker in your browser let us know the browser you are using and we can suggest how to install one. For example, with Firefox you just install a dictionary for the language(s) you want to use.