Learn How You Can Use Yahoo Mail Together with Outlook

Do you have a Yahoo Mail account you would like to or need to use with Outlook? If so, you’ve come to the right place. This article can show you the steps you need to follow to get Outlook and Yahoo Mail working together. I think you will really enjoy the convenience of having all your email through one program. You will enjoy being able to use Outlook’s familiar interface for all your work, instead of being stuck with a different way of doing things for each email account.

You can only use your Yahoo Mail with Outlook if you have a premium Yahoo Mail account. In other words, you must have either:

  • A Yahoo Mail Plus account ($19.99 per year)
  • A Yahoo Business Email account ($9.95 per month)

Yahoo won’t let you connect to Outlook or any mail reader besides their web-based one unless you are using one of their paid mail services. But its easy to convert a free Yahoo Mail account (the kind that most people start out with) to a Mail Plus account isn’t hard at all. http://mailplus.mail.yahoo.com/ will open a new window where you can upgrade your free account to a Mail Plus account. Be sure to return to this article once you have upgraded your account so we can configure Outlook to work with it. And don’t worry. If you’ve already upgraded to a Yahoo Mail Plus account, the Mail Plus page will tell you that you don’t need to upgrade.

The steps required to configure Yahoo Mail Plus and Yahoo Business Mail to work with Outlook are very similar. Before we go further with the configuration, you need to be aware of something. As part of the process for configuring Yahoo mail with Outlook you will tell the Yahoo mail servers not to keep copies of messages on the server once you view them with Outlook. Once that happens, you won’t be able to read them anymore using the Yahoo Mail web interface. Under normal circumstances, this is the way you want to set things up, since having multiple versions of a message floating around will surely cause you headaches, and is something to be aware of. Just don’t be surprised the first time you open the Yahoo Mail web interface and can’t find messages that you are sure you saw in Outlook.

Back to the configuration process…

…the exact steps you follow during the configuration process depend on which version of Outlook you have. To keep things simple, there are two separate procedures, one for Outlook 2007, and the other for earlier versions. To keep this article from getting gigantic (and to make it easy to update the procedures should they need to change), the procedures are on the Living With Outlook (http://www.Living-With-Outlook.com) website instead of right here.

If you want to make Outlook 2007 work with your Yahoo Mail account, go to http://www.living-with-outlook.com/yahoo-mail.html#Configure2007Anchor

If you want to make a version of Outlook that’s not Outlook 2007 work with your Yahoo Mail account, go to http://www.living-with-outlook.com/yahoo-mail.html#ConfigureOutlookAnchor