Yipple.com – Free webmail with a touch of Mobile Me

Perhaps comparing Yipple with Mobile Me is a vast exaggeration. It does not come close to all the features of Mobile Me, but it somehow has an tiny Apple feel to it (without Apple’s attention to details though).

After playing around with the interface of Yipple for a while, I got a déjà vu feeling. It somehow felt very familiar. When switching to the ‘simple’ theme it all became clear to me: Yipple is nothing but a branded version of Atmail. The only thing Yipple has done is to slap a (buggy) theme on top of Atmail and called it Yipple. What makes it even more funny is that, at least in my opinion, the default theme in Atmail (named ‘simple’ in Yipple) looks much better than Yipple’s default theme (named ‘advanced’). On top of that, Atmail’s theme works just fine in both Safari and Firefox, which is something Yipple’s theme does not. In addition, Yipple did not expand their theme to the entire service. For instance, if you switch to Calendar, it uses the default Atmail template.

I’m not sure if Yipple runs the full email server from Atmail or just the webmail. However, given that they support Atmail-sync for synchronization with Microsoft Outlook I believe that they actually run the full server.

Running a branded version of an existing product is not a crime. It’s actually a great idea. Why re-invent the wheel, right? Let’s think of Yipple as an email service. What do they offer?

• 100Mb storage for e-mail
• POP3/IMAP support (At least that’s what their blog claims. I wasn’t able to find any server settings)
• Wireless Push Support (the documentation is way off though. I’m sure 192.168.2.28 is not the server IP)
• Synchronization of contacts, calendar and tasks with Microsoft Outlook (with AtMail-sync)
• The ability to check external IMAP/POP3 accounts. Unfortunately you cannot ‘add’ a 3rd-party IMAP/POP3 account to your Yipple-account. You can simply check POP3/IMAP accounts using Yipple’s interface
• PGP-support. I never tried out this feature, but it’s great that they have security in mind.

The default theme in Yipple to the left, and the default Atmail theme to the right.

What’s the verdict? With 100Mb of storage and a buggy website, Yipple doesn’t quite cut it. Perhaps if they did the following, Yipple could be an interesting alternative:

• Hire a professional web-designer to re-write their web-site (including the theme)
• Offer more storage as a premium option (but 100Mb is still too low for the free-option)
• Add full working IMAP/POP3 support
• Rewrite the documentation

Then again, there is no shortage of free email providers. Yipple needs to find a niche or unique feature to bring to the table, not just re-brand an existing solution.

I tried to reach Yipple for a comment, but as of this writing, I haven’t heard back from them.

Thanks to ozar over at EmailDiscussions for discovering this service.

Update 1: As our reader Debi points out, the IMAP/POP3 settings are in the welcome email (simply yipple.com). I tried connecting with IMAP but received ‘connection refused.’ I’ve reached out to Yipple to let them know about this.