All You Should Know About Yahoo Mail

Yahoo Mail is one of the most popular Email services which was launched in 1997 through an American company Yahoo which stands for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.

Yahoomail is in fact the third largest email service in the world. It presently has 227.8 million active users with about 26 billion emails sent daily. There are four different email plans which Yahoo mail offers to its users.

Out of the four plans, three plans (Basic, Plus, and Ad-free) are provided for your personal use while the fourth plan is basically a business plan.

There are majorly three web interfaces that are available on Yahoo mail at a given time. The first interface which is the original one was the “Yahoo Mail Classic” which was developed in 1997 and was in use till July 2013.

New features were included in the 2005 version of Yahoo mail. The new features were the Ajax interface, improved search options, keyboard shortcuts, drag-and-drop, and tabs.

Yahoo released a beta version of its mail service in October 2010 which had improvements in search options, Facebook integration, and as well as performance. This became its default interface by 2011.

Yahoo Mail Rivals

When Yahoo mail was becoming one of the most populous and successful web-based email services in 2004, Google came with its email service. On the 1^st of April, 2004, Google released its Gmail service with 1GB of storage.

This was a big threat to the major email services providers at that time especially Yahoo mail. These major email service providers had to increase their mailbox storage in response to Gmail.

Yahoo mail increased its storage to 1GB and later eventually made it to be unlimited storage which was free from 27^th of March 2007 till 8^th of October, 2013.

Updates on the Yahoo Mail Services

The following updates were made  in the Yahoomail service:

Yahoo Updates in 2002

In this year, the yahoo network as a whole was redesigned. On the 2nd of July, the company’s website was changed, and was announced that even the mail and other services from Yahoo will be changed accordingly.

New features were also added which included the drop-down option, tabs of different categories, and also a new user-customizable colour scheme.

The launch of Yahoo mail Plus was also a part of Yahoo’s initiative plan to offer premium services that deliver reliable services to its customers

Updates in 2004

On the 9^th of July, yahoo acquired oddpost which was a webmail service that simulated a desktop email client. So many of the features of oddpost were incorporated into Yahoo mail service which included new features such as drag-and-drop support, right-click options, a preview pane, RSS feeds and email caching to reduce the response time.

Yahoomail Updates in 2011

In May 2011, the new Yahoo mail became the default interface for the users making it compulsory to use the new interface. Because of the issues reported by its users, yahoo had to disable some of its features such as pasting an email address into the sender’s space, the right mouse click on the browser which therefore created a sense of dissatisfaction.

Updates in 2013 and 2014

The year 2013 was a heavy setback for Yahoo in respect to its email service. In this year, yahoo worked on the site and removed so many important and useful features.

Yahoo’s new interface was designed to enhance the experience of mobile users. While concentrating on them, Yahoo did injustice to its desktop interface and was questioned and criticized for this worldwide.

Later in this year during December, Yahoo mail suffered a huge blow when approximately one million users lost access to their emails for several days.

In 2014, a major security breach occurred when an undisclosed number of usernames and passwords were released to hackers, this was believed to have occurred because of a third-party website. All those affected were requested to change their passwords.

Updates in 2015 and 2017

In the year 2015, Yahoo updated its mail service. The features were improved and the Yahoo Key Account was released. The Yahoo Key Account was a smartphone-based replacement for the password logins.

On the 23^rd of December, 2017, Yahoo introduced a new developer update which looked to reduce ads to an extent as compared to its previous versions.

Yahoo Mail Sign Up

Here you’ll find the step by step guide on how to register for a Yahoo Mail account:

• Go to your browser and type https://login.yahoo.com/ in the address bar, then you will see a sign-in page where existing users can log in.
• Just below the space given to input your email, there is an option “don’t have an account? Sign up”. Click on the “sign up”
• You will see a page which asks you to fill in your personal details, then preferred username and password. The login ID you type with a @yahoo.com suffix will be your Yahoo email address, fill in the required details and click on ‘’continue’’.
• You will see a page where you will be asked to enter the account key which is sent to the mobile number you filled when signing up. Enter the account key and proceed.
• Congratulations, your account is now created and will be used to log in to the different services offered by Yahoo.

Yahoo Mail Login

Follow these instructions below will guide you on how to login to your Yahoo account:

• Go to and open https://login.yahoo.com/ in your browser
• Enter your Yahoo ID or email address and click “Next”
• Type the password associated with your email address and click on “Sign in”
• You will be signed in to your account and also see your name on the top right-hand corner of the Yahoo home page.

How to Make use of Yahoo Mail

So many people think that Yahoo mail is limited to only sending and receiving emails but it is very well more than that. This is because people are not familiar with the basic and advanced features of Yahoo Mail.

You can send mails with attachments which could be files, images as well as videos but there is a limit of 25MB for the attachments in Yahoo Mail and you can’t send an attachment that is over 25MB.

Yahoo mail offers unlimited message storage, email search, contact list, virus scanning, and spam blocking. I will explain the basic features of Yahoo mail and how you can use them, and then slowly we move to the more advanced features and their usage.

Formatting and Sending a Mail Yahoo Mail Account

Once you have created an account on Yahoo mail, you log in with your username or email address and password to get access to your mail account. Once you are signed in, you can then send an email to anybody with a valid email address. Let us see how to send a mail in Yahoomail:

• Click on “Compose” on the top left-hand side and you will see a window to write a message
• Input the email address of the person you want to send a mail to in the “To” field.
• Write the subject in the “Subject” field and write the body of the message in the space provided.
• There are several formatting tools provided at the bottom of the page that you can use to edit your email with fonts, colours, emojis, GIFs and attachments. Use them to make your mail presentable.
• Check the spellings and grammar and click on “Send” on the bottom left-hand side of the page. Your email will be sent to the mentioned recipient.

Receiving, Sending and Saving Mails in Yahoo Account

There are so many actions that can be taken for a particular mail which is as follows:

• Click on reply to send a reply to the sender
• Back makes you to go back to the list of mails.
• Reply-All enables you to send replies to multiple Ids.
• Forward allows you to mail a new email ID.
• Click on move to move the mail to the selected folder.
• Delete will more your deleted mail from the list and send it to the trash folder.
• Spam marks any suspicious mail as spam.
• Draft will enable you save your unsent message

Now I have talked about the basic features of Yahoo Mail. Let’s shift our attention to the advanced features of Yahoo mail and their usage. 

Managing Attachments

Attachments are images, files (Audio or Video), spreadsheets, or documents that you send along with your mail. Since the files are attached with the messages hence the reason why it is called attachments.

There is a limit to attachments and that’s 25Mb and you can’t send the attachment if it’s over 25Mb.

Below are the steps involved in adding an attachment and sending it through mail:

• Click on the Paper Clip Icon available on the immediate right-hand side of the “Send” button on the extreme bottom side of the compose window.
• Folder browser will open and you can select the file from your any location where it been save on your computer hard drive. In order to attach the selected file, you either double-click the file or just select the file and press OK.
• If you want to attach more than one document repeat the process until the limit reaches 25Mb. Or better still, select one and hold down your control key (ctrl) to select others.

How to download attachment on Yahoomail

Here are steps to download an attachment that you received:

• When you open your Yahoo mail, you will see the name, size and type of the document attached with the mail.
• You can either preview the document or click on the download icon to download and save the attachment to your computer hard drive.

YahooMail Archiving and Searching

Yahoo Mail allows the user to create folders that help to manage your mails according to the sender or subject.

Folders such as inbox, spam, trash, sent, contacts etc, are provided by Yahoo and there is also an option to create a personalized folder as well.

To create a folder Yahoomail account, click the new folder option at the extreme bottom left-hand side, then name the folder and press enter. The folder with your desired name will be created for you.

Yahoo gives you an option to check or search for documents, photos and people attached with mails.

Issues related to User ID and Password

• Forgetting your username or password
• “Invalid ID or password” error
• “Account Locked” message
• Getting “First time signing in here?” message
• Sign-in screen reloads.

Why do people love Yahoo Mail?

• User – friendly
• User Interface – the UI of Yahoo Mail is very informative, properly managed and also very easy to use.
• Entertainment
• Themes
• Yahoo finance – this integrated with the mail is the best financial interface we have presently. While accessing your mail, you can also have a look at your markets and finances.
• Privacy Policy – it has one of the best if not the best privacy policy, as a matter of fact it is better than that of Google’s or any other mail services.

CONCLUSION

Yahoo Mail is one of the best email services in the world. As a matter of fact, it is been used widely and it’s still very popular even with the success of Gmail.

In this article, I have explained everything you need to know about Yahoo Mail. You will be able to use all the features and services offered or provided by Yahoo more easily and efficiently.