11 Yahoo Mail Tips for Easier Emailing

It's been a tough year for Yahoo Mail. Late last year, the service had an outage affecting around 1 percent of its users, but it lasted several days and was bad enough that CEO Marissa Mayer had to make a public apology.

A month later, hackers hit the service hard, forcing the company to reset a lot of user passwords. Bad ads with malware infected users. It even had to shut down the China version of Yahoo Mail, and that's a lot of customers. Plus, many customers are in the throes of another outage at press time, due to a severed undersea cable.

Maybe worse—for the users, not for Yahoo—is the elimination of Yahoo Mail Plus, where you could pay $19.99 per year to get rid of ads on the service. Now it's called Yahoo Ad Free Mail—and it's $49.99 a year (if you were already a Mail Plus subscriber, you're grandfathered in, so keep paying the lower price). And, it lost its Editors' Choice rating from PCMag (that title now belongs to Microsoft's Outlook.com, formerly known as Hotmail).

But don't weep much for Yahoo. It's still the No. 2 online property overall, with 217 million unique visitors just on desktop computers alone in October 2014—just a hair behind Google's collective 236 million. Reportedly over 100 million people use Yahoo Mail every single day—that's second only to Google's Gmail. That means it's time to take a closer look at Yahoo Mail and see what tweaks and tricks are under the surface, waiting to be used. Hit the slideshow for our quick collection of the 11 best Yahoo Mail tips.

Take on the Boss Mode

On the desktop browser, in the lower left corner of the Yahoo Mail screen, sits a small icon that looks like a mountain in a box. You don't have to even click it, just hover the cursor over it to enter the Yahoo Mail boss mode. (Or, just tap the Esc key once.)The purpose is two-fold: to instantly hide what you're reading from prying eyes, like those of your boss, and to access the absolute quickest and best way to change the theme to your Yahoo Mail, giving it an entirely new look (see the next slide).

Use Images for Backgrounds

In keeping up with the Jones'—or by going back to what it used to offer, at least—Yahoo again has themes you can change, including image-based backgrounds. You can only choose from a few images, handpicked by Yahoo from its Flickr affiliate (Gmail lets you use any image you want). But Yahoo does a good job of fuzzing out that background when you're on a screen that requires attention, like a compose email window. The images can also be selected in the iOS and Android apps, but they don't sync between devices.

Stop Saving Contacts

You don't need an address book with Yahoo Mail, not for email addresses anyway. Typing in a name will launch an auto-suggestion that Yahoo Mail fills in, complete with the email address, based on your habits, history, stored messages, and yes, your address book if you've got one.

Go Magazine Style on Tablets

At the bottom of your message on a landscape-oriented tablet, you'll see a double arrow icon—the kind that usually indicates a full-screen mode. What that does in the Yahoo Mail app is go into "magazine style" for message reading, so you can swipe left or right to read new or old messages.

Quick Actions for Mobile

On the smartphone, the Yahoo Mail app has a quick action set of tools. Just swipe a message (left or right, it doesn't matter) to get a set of icons that quickly let you set an message to unread, move it to a folder, mark as important, send it to spam, or delete it.

Forward All Yahoo Mail

Yahoo Mail supports POP and IMAP access via third-party email clients like Thunderbird, but what if you just want all your incoming mail to get forwarded to another account? Easy. Go into the settings (click the gear icon on the upper right of your desktop in Yahoo Mail), click Accounts, then the Edit button. Click the radio button on Forward, and enter the email where you'd like messages to end up. You also get the options to Store and Forward (which keeps messages on Yahoo Mail even when forwarded), to Forward Only, or Store and Forward and Mark as Read—so you don't have to deal with those messages again when you visit Yahoo Mail.

Set Up an Extra Email Address

Want more than one address at Yahoo.com? Yahoo Mail makes it simple. Go into Settings, Accounts, and click "Manage extra email address." You can make them up your own, or Yahoo provides some (terrible) options. As long as it isn't in use, you can create one, but with a few million users (and many more that are dormant) finding original names is hard. Once created, hand out the address and all messages sent to it will show up in your Yahoo Mail; you can also use the name to sign into your Yahoo account; there's even an option to turn it into your default "from" address when you send messages. Once you pick a name, you can only change it a couple of times a year.

Quick Search by Sender

When you view a list of messages, you'll see a magnifying glass icon when you pass the cursor over a message. Click it, and you'll get a quick view of all the messages sent by that sender.

SMS via Yahoo Mail

Yahoo Messenger—the company's now-little-used instant messaging platform—is integrated with Yahoo Mail. Click the smiley face tab at the top on the desktop to access it. Once on, enter a phone number and send a message—it'll go to the recipient as an SMS text. In fact, the recipient will get two seperate messages. One will tell them "A Yahoo users has sent you a message. Reply to that SMS to respond. Reply INFO to this SMS for help or go to y.ahoo.it/imsms." That site just shows a collection of all the mobile apps available to Yahoo users. (You should get Mail, Weather, and Flickr.)

Make Notes in Mail

You only get this option on the desktop Web version of Yahoo Mail, not the apps. But click the little notebook icon tab, and you get a low-rent version of OneNote or Evernote, where you can create notebooks, to fill with all the notes you like.

Protect Mail with 2FA

If you don't know what two-factor authentication (or 2FA) is, read this. (Short version: it's when you need more than just a password to sign on to a service, typically a code sent to your phone.) Yahoo calls its version Second Sign-in Verification. It's a very smart thing to have in place—it could prevent you from being one of the hacked, when (not if) Yahoo Mail gets attacked again. Here are the steps to take to turn on 2FA for Yahoo.

It'll protect not just your mail, but all your Yahoo account services. Apps that don't support second-sign in verification—like the mobile Yahoo Mail apps!—get "app passwords." You set that up in the same place. It's a pain—but getting hacked is a bigger pain.

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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