Getting Outlook to Work with A Yahoo Mail Account

Do you have a Yahoo Mail account you would like to or need to use with Outlook? If you would, 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 practical benefits of having all your email through one program. You’ll enjoy 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 account you own separately.

Unfortunately, you can’t use a free Yahoo Mail account with Outlook. You must! have a premium Yahoo Mail account. That means, you must use 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. However, converting a free Yahoo Mail account (the kind you probably have if you don’t remember paying for the account) to a Mail Plus account isn’t hard at all. http://mailplus.mail.yahoo.com/ will open a new window that walks you through the Mail Plus upgrade process. 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 almost the same. But before we talk about that, you need to be aware of something. During the configuration process you will be telling the Yahoo mail servers not to keep copies of messages on the server once you view them with Outlook. This means they will not be visible from the Web once you read them with Outlook. Under normal circumstances, this is the way you want to set things up, since having more than one copy of a message in existence at one time 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 are working with. To make this as easy as possible, there are two completely 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 rather than included in this article.

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

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

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