I’m a big Google Services user but some of my friends and colleagues prefer Yahoo! I’ve written about how to integrate Google Services with my Mac, iPhone and iPad but I’ve remiss in writing anything about Yahoo! Enabling Yahoo! Services on Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) is fairly straight forward.

System Preferences

The direct method for setting up Google services on OS X Lion is via the System Preferences. OS X Lion System Preferences has a new option called Mail, Contacts & Calendars under the Internet & Wireless section. Select it.

Mail, Contacts, and Calendars

If you are an iPhone or iPad owner this next screen shot will seem very familiar to you. To setup a particular service, click the Add Account… button and select the icon for the service. In this case, we are setting up Yahoo! services so select Yahoo!.

Once you select Yahoo! you will be prompted to add you Yahoo! username and password. The username should be you complete email address. After entering your credentials click Setup.

Once your Mac has connected successfully to the Yahoo! servers you can select the services you want to sync to your Mac. Go ahead and select all of them including Yahoo! Chat.

You should now be able to read your Yahoo! Mail via the Mac OS X Mail app, chat on Yahoo! via iChat, and your Address Book should start filling up with your Yahoo! contact. Launch iCal and you will see all your Yahoo! calendar details.

Image via CrunchBase

Both Yahoo and Google provide a method for importing and exporting email addresses to and from OS X AddressBook but I wanted an easier way to keep things synchronized. Fortunately, if you are running OS X 10.5 (Leopard), the AddressBook application provides a straight forward way to do so.

Google is special

Like most people I use a web based email service like Yahoo! Mail or Gmail. And like most people I have been using one of these services for quite a long time and I have quite a large number of email addresses that I have saved in the contact list of each of those services, especially Gmail.

Setup

Setup is quick and easy. Go into the Preferences for AddressBook. On the General tab you will see three check boxes for each of the following services: MobileMe, Exchange, Yahoo and Google. You can select all (or none) of these check boxes to enable syncing with each of those services. Google is my preferred service for email so tha’s the service I setup. Once you select the checkbox, AddressBook will prompt you for your Gmail username and password. Enter that information and click OK to complete setup. If you have a large AddressBook it could take a while for the sync to complete.

Finish Up

You may already have some contacts in AddressBook that are also in Yahoo or Google and you may find duplicates in your AddressBook once the sync is complete. These are easy to remove. From the AddressBook menu select Card->Look for duplicates. AddressBook will find and merge duplicates entries into just one entry. Any changes or additions to your AddressBook contacts will update your online Google or Yahoo contacts and vice versa.