Yahoo Mail

Yahoo Mail is a popular email service created by Yahoo. It started on October 8, 1997, and is used by many people around the world. Over 225 million users access Yahoo Mail.

People can use Yahoo Mail with a web browser, a mobile app, or special programs called email clients.

The service is free for personal messages. For a small monthly fee, users can get extra features. Yahoo Mail is available in many languages, making it easy for people everywhere to use.

History

In 1997, Yahoo bought a company called Four11, which had a webmail service named RocketMail. Yahoo Mail started using RocketMail's technology at that time. Yahoo chose to buy RocketMail instead of building its own service because another popular email service, Hotmail, was growing very fast.

Over the years, Yahoo Mail changed and added new features. In 2004, Google launched Gmail, which offered more storage space than other email services. Yahoo responded by increasing its storage options too. In 2011, Yahoo Mail got a new look and added features to work better with Facebook. There were more changes in later years, including updates to make the service work well on mobile devices and new tools to help manage emails. In 2025, Yahoo Mail started using artificial intelligence to help summarize emails and suggest actions.

User interface

Yahoo Mail offered three web interfaces for users to choose from. The original "Yahoo! Mail Classic" stayed available until July 2013 in North America. In 2005, a new version was added with features like drag-and-drop, better search, and keyboard shortcuts. In May 2011, an updated beta version became the default, and the current webmail interface was introduced in 2017.

Spam policy

Yahoo! Mail is sometimes used by people who send unwanted messages to see if others will reply. Yahoo! does not allow this and will close accounts involved, meaning those people lose access to all Yahoo! services linked to their account. Yahoo! also says that because its servers are located in California, using them for unwanted messages could break local laws.

In February 2006, Yahoo! and another company called AOL decided to let some groups pay a very small amount for each message they sent. This payment would let their messages skip past Yahoo!'s checks for unwanted messages. However, not many groups used this option, and the company handling the payments stopped operating in 2011.

Filters

To help stop unwanted messages, Yahoo! Mail started changing certain words in 2002. Words that might let someone do harmful things were turned into different words. For example, "mocha" became "espresso" and "expression" became "statement." This sometimes led to mistakes, like changing "prevent" to "prevalent." Yahoo! later stopped this method and instead added an underscore in front of some suspicious words.

Greylisting

See also: Greylisting (email)

Messages sent to Yahoo! Mail addresses might be held for a short time as part of Yahoo!'s checks for unwanted messages. This delay usually lasts only a few hours, but sometimes longer, and neither the sender nor receiver is usually told about it. Yahoo! does not explain this process in detail, but some information is available.

Controversies

Yahoo Mail has had some problems over the years. In 2004, Yahoo’s office in Hong Kong shared information about a journalist’s account with Chinese authorities, which caused some criticism. In 2012 and 2013, hackers were able to access many user accounts.

Yahoo has also had issues with managing accounts, like deleting inactive ones and handling phishing attacks. Yahoo has also been reported to look at emails to share some information with the US National Security Agency.

Email addresses

When you create a new Yahoo! Mail account, the email address ends with yahoo.com or myyahoo.com. In the past, people could choose from other endings like ymail.com or rocketmail.com. There were also special endings for different countries, such as yahoo.co.uk for the United Kingdom, yahoo.fr for France, and yahoo.it for Italy. These older country endings are still kept for people who already have accounts, but new accounts can no longer use them.

Yahoo! Japan has its own service with endings like yahoo.co.jp and ymail.ne.jp. Some internet service providers that use Yahoo! Mail also give their own endings to their customers. For example, AT&T offers free accounts to people who are not their customers.

Previously, Yahoo also offered business email through Yahoo! Small Business, but this service moved to Verizon Small Business Essentials in early 2022.