How to set up and use Yahoo Mail
In this course, you’ll learn about Yahoo Mail, the free email service from Yahoo. You’ll find out how to create a Yahoo Mail account, how it works in your web browser, and how to create, send, receive, reply to and organise your emails.
The activities below go into detail about how to stay safer when using email, including changing your Yahoo Mail password, downloading attachments, blocking nuisance emails, reporting Spam, and even how to close a Yahoo Mail account if you ever need to.
If you are already a Yahoo Mail user, there is a handy video of more advanced tips below that you might like to watch. It includes chapters and demonstrations on how to:
- manage the ads that appear in your Yahoo Mail Inbox
- use the Notepad feature to create and organise notes
- switch on notifications for new emails
- archive or delete emails in batches.
Transcript
Welcome to the "Your Yahoo Inbox: advanced tips" course. In this course, you'll learn some advanced tips for using your free Yahoo Mail service.
You'll learn how to manage the ads you'll see, as well as how to make the most of organising and taking notes for your emails.
This demonstration uses a Windows computer running the Chrome browser. If you use a different device or browser, it might look slightly different, but you should still be able to follow along.
To follow along, you will need to have a Yahoo email address and password already set up. Your Yahoo Mail should be open in your web browser and showing the Inbox.
When you use the free version of Yahoo Mail, ads appear in various places on the screen. In your Yahoo Mail Inbox, you can see all your emails in a list, ordered by date. The first item in the list, however, isn't an email, it's an ad.
An ad will appear in most folders that show a list of emails, including the Drafts, Sent, Archive and Spam folders. If you can't see all the folders, click More and they will appear.
If a folder doesn't contain any emails, you'll see the Yahoo video player instead of an ad. Let's see what that looks like.
Click Archive in the left menu to open the Archive folder. Since our Archive folder is empty, the video player appears. It will disappear as soon as we put an email into this folder. Let's move an email from the Inbox to the Archive folder to demonstrate.
Click on Inbox in the left menu to go back to the Inbox. To select an email, click the empty tick box to the left of the sender's name. A tick appears in the box to confirm the email is selected.
Now click the Move icon at the top of the Inbox panel. It looks like a folder with an arrow. A menu appears showing the names of the folders where you can move this email. Click on Archive, and the email will disappear from the Inbox and the menu will close.
Let's see how the Archive folder looks now. In the left menu, click Archive. Now, instead of the video player, you'll see the email you just moved here, and a one-line ad above it.
When you use the free version of Yahoo Mail, you can't get rid of all ads all the time, but you can stop a particular ad from showing.
To do this, click the three dots to the right of the line the ad is on. A menu pops up, and you can click "Why this ad?" to get some information about how Yahoo Mail chooses which ads to show you. For now though, click Dislike this ad. The ad is replaced by a grey bar and some text saying, "This ad has been hidden". You can click the X on the right of this grey bar to close the message. In a moment or two, a new ad will appear.
As well as the ad at the top of the list of emails, Yahoo Mail shows an ad in a column on the right. You have some control over which ads appear here, too. Look in the top right corner of the ad. If you can see a blue I or cross, click on it. An Ads by Google panel will replace the ad, with a couple of buttons. You can click "Why this ad?" to find out more about how these ads are selected. If you don't like the ad, you can click the "Stop seeing this ad" button, and the panel will change to show four options. Click the option that best matches your reason for not wanting to see the ad. The panel will show "We'll try not to show this ad again" for a few moments, then it will change to "Ad closed by Google". After a little while, a new ad will appear. If the ad doesn't have a cross in the corner, you can just ignore it.
You can take notes and organise them in Yahoo Mail, using the Notebook feature. To open it, look for the Notepad icon above the ad in the right hand column of Yahoo Mail. It's the third in a row of four icons and looks like a notebook page with one corner folded. Click it to open the Notepad.
Yahoo Mail's Notepad opens in a new browser tab. The Inbox is still open in the first browser tab, and you can click on it when you want to return to your emails. Yahoo's Notepad is a handy tool that lets you keep notes, which you can save to Notebooks. The panel on the left side contains the notebooks. We haven't created any new notebooks yet, but Yahoo has created one for us, simply called Notebook. This is highlighted blue, which means it's selected, and any new notes we make will be saved to it. In this demonstration, we haven't made any notes either, so the notebook is empty.
Click New note to add one. An editing panel will appear on the far right side of the screen, with some options that you can use to make your note. Yahoo will call the note New note. Click on this title and press the Backspace key to remove the words "New note", then enter a title of your own.
When you're done, click in the white space under the note title, and start typing your note. The note saves as you type, so you can close the Notebook tab at any time without losing it. A preview of your note will appear in the middle of the screen. If you make more notes in this notebook, they will appear here in a list. Let's look at how to make a new notebook.
In the left column, click on the blue text, New notebook. Make sure you click on the words, not on the plus sign next to them. Yahoo will call your notebook "New notebook". Press the Backspace key to remove this title, then enter a name. For our demonstration, we'll call it "Family Reunion". When you've finished typing, press Enter on your keyboard, and the new note will appear in the left menu, below the default notebook. This notebook is highlighted blue, which means it's selected. Since this is a new notebook, it doesn't contain any notes yet. Let's move our note into this notebook.
Click on the first notebook in the list, which is called "Notebook," to see the note we created earlier. Click on the preview of the note in the middle column. Two icons will appear at the top of the page. Look for the Move icon. It looks like a folder with an up arrow. Click on it to see a list of notebooks that we can move the note into. We only have one other notebook for this demonstration. We want to move our note to the Family Reunion notebook, so click this. Since we've just moved the note, it will disappear from the current Notebook.
To see it again, click on the Family Reunion notebook in the left column. When you've finished making notes, you can close the browser tab by clicking the cross, and return to your Yahoo Mail Inbox, which should still be open in your browser.
[eSafety tip] If you're having trouble finding your Yahoo Mail Inbox after using Notepad, open a new browser window and type https://mail.yahoo.com into the Search bar.
It's handy to know when you receive new email, and you can let Yahoo Mail send a notification to your computer whenever that happens. At the top right of the screen is the Settings icon. It looks like a cog wheel. Click on it to open the Settings menu. A panel pops up showing a number of settings options. At the bottom of the menu, click More settings. The settings options will fill the whole screen.
From the menu on the left, click Notifications. The Notifications settings panel appears. In the middle column, next to Desktop notifications, click the switch to turn on notifications. The switch will change from grey to a colour when Notifications are switched on. Now, whenever you have Yahoo Mail open in your web browser, and you receive a new email, a small pop-up notification will appear to let you know.
If you want to stop receiving notifications in the future, you can return to this screen and click the switch again to turn them off. To return to the Inbox view, click Back to Inbox at the top of the menu on the left.
You can keep your Inbox tidy by moving or deleting lots of emails at once. Let's archive some old emails. For this demonstration, we'll use three emails we don't want to completely delete, but which we don't need in the Inbox anymore. We could archive these one by one, but let's see how to select several to archive as a batch.
Each email has a tick box to the left of the sender's name. Click an email's tick box to select it. A coloured bar appears over the email to show that it's selected. You can click the tick box of each email you want to include in the batch, or select them all at once. Let's look at how to do that. With the first email already selected, hold down the Shift key on your keyboard. Now click the last email you want to select in the batch, and release the Shift key. The first and last emails, and all those in between are now highlighted and selected. At the top of the Inbox view, click the Archive icon. It looks like a box with a lid. The batch of emails will disappear from the Inbox and are now tidied away in the Archive.
To see these emails again, look for the menu on the left. Click More, and then click Archive. All the emails in your Archive will appear in the middle of the screen, sorted by date.
You can also delete emails, instead of archiving them. Click the tick box to the left of the sender name, to select each email you'd like to delete. When you have a batch ready, find the Delete icon at the top of the Inbox. It looks like a garbage bin. Click on it, and the selected emails will be removed. But they're not gone for good. Yahoo Mail just moves them to the Deleted Items folder in the left menu, so you can view, open and even restore them to your Inbox.
You've learned about ads in Yahoo Mail, how to use the Notepad and set up notifications. You've also learned how to move and delete multiple emails at once. If you're unsure about any steps, you can rewind the video or click the chapter headings to jump to the start of a chapter.
If you're ready to move on, there are many other courses to explore on Be Connected.
Sign in to save your progress and earn a certificate
1
What is Yahoo Mail?
5 min
2
How to create a Yahoo Mail account
7 min
3
Managing your Yahoo Mail Inbox
6 min
4
Sending and replying to emails in Yahoo Mail
6 min
5
How to use Yahoo Mail Folders and Search
7 min
6
Using Yahoo Mail safely
5 min