Yahoo to discontinue support for Mail, Contacts on older Apple devices

By Roger Fingas

Support for Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Contacts will be discontinued for some older Apple devices as of June 15, Yahoo said in a Thursday blog post.

In the case of Yahoo Mail, people with devices running iOS 4 or earlier will no longer be able to use their Yahoo accounts with iOS' native Mail app. At the same time, Yahoo Contacts will stop syncing with Macs on OS X Lion or earlier.

The changes are needed to ensure the speed, security, and functionality of Yahoo services, the company explained. People with unsupported operating systems will still be able to reach Mail and Contacts on the Web via mail.yahoo.com.

Yahoo also said it is planning to shut down a number of other properties entirely, most notably maps.yahoo.com, which is closing at the end of June. Maps will continue to be a part of Yahoo offerings, but only in relation to services like Flickr and search.

Also shuttering by the end of the month is Yahoo TV in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Canada, and the UK, along with Yahoo Autos in those same countries except for Canada. By mid-month Yahoo Movies will disappear in Spain, and much of Yahoo Philippines will be gone, redirecting Web visitors to Yahoo Singapore. Even Singapore will lose Yahoo Entertainment come early July.

Pipes, the company's Web aggregation tool, will no longer allow new Pipe creation after August 30. The service will come to an end a month later in order to let developers migrate any essential data.