Getting Outlook to Work with Your Yahoo Mail

Would you like to connect your Yahoo Mail account to Outlook so you can send, receive, and manage all your email in one place? If you would, this article can show you the steps you need to follow to make Outlook and Yahoo Mail play nicely together. Once you get this set up, You’re really going to like the pleasure of having access to all your mail messages through one program. You will also like being able to use Outlook’s familiar interface for all your work, rather than the mish-mash of different tool you face when you deal with each email account.

Unfortunately, you can’t use a free Yahoo Mail account with Outlook. You must! have a premium Yahoo Mail account. That means, you have to be using 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 is simple. http://mailplus.mail.yahoo.com/ opens 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 process of configuring both types of Yahoo Mail to work with Outlook is almost the same. But before we talk about that, there’s one thing you should know. During the configuration process you will be telling the Yahoo mail servers not to retain copies of messages on the sever once Outlook downloads them so you can read them. Once that happens, you won’t be able to read them anymore using the Yahoo Mail web interface. This is most likely the way you want things to work anyway, since having multiple versions of a message floating around will surely cause you confusion and frustration, and is something to be aware of.

Back to the configuration process…

…the exact steps you follow during the configuration process depend on which version of Outlook you are working with. To keep things simple, there are two separate procedures, one for Outlook 2007, and the other for earlier versions. In the interest of saving space and allowing the procedures to be updated as needed, the procedures are listed on the Living With Outlook (www.Living-With-Outlook.com) website rather than included in this article.

To learn how to configure Outlook 2007 and Yahoo Mail, go to http://www.living-with-outlook.com/yahoo-mail.html#Configure2007Anchor

To learn how to configure earlier versions of Outlook with Yahoo Mail, go to http://www.living-with-outlook.com/yahoo-mail.html#ConfigureOutlookAnchor