With well over a quarter of a billion subscribers, Yahoomail is undoubtedly one of the most popular web-based services. It is also one of the oldest, started as it was way back in 1997.

How Yahoomail.com works

Yahoomail is basically a free web-based service. To start making use of it, one only needs to sign up for a free account with Yahoo. Having signed up for the account, you instantly get the opportunity to send emails, receive emails, store emails, run a web-based contacts book, run a web-based calendar application and run a web-based notepad application… among many other things.

Signing up for Yahoomail.com

The Yahoomail sign up process is very simple and straightforward. Only the most basic of details are asked for: namely your name, your country, your zip code, your preferred log in name (also termed as a username), and your preferred password.

Yahoo will also ask you to specify an answer to a ‘recovery question’ that being the question they would ask you, to determine whether you are indeed the owner of the account, should you lose your password at some time in the feature.

Of course, to ensure that you are not a robot, Yahoo will also have you enter a Captcha code.

If this is the account you will be using for official or semiofficial communication, it is essential that the name details you provide be true, because those are the ‘sender details’ the emails from the account will be bearing.

Increasingly, Yahoo requests that you provide them with an alternate email (if you have one), so that in case you lose your password, they can sent you the link to set a new password to that alternate email. It is truly important that you provide this, if you have one.

Using Yahoomail

As mentioned earlier, one of the things you can do with your Yahoomail account is to send emails to other people from it. The people you send emails to don’t have to Yahoo mail account owners. Provided they have any valid email address, any email sent by you from your Yahoomail account will get to them. The sending bit is easy: it is just about signing into your account, clicking on the button labeled ‘compose’ and filling in the recipient email details (as well as the emails of other people you may want it copied to, under ‘CC’ and ‘BCC’ – if there are other people you would want it copied to. Otherwise leave those fields blank). Under subject, you enter the topic of your email, with the main email body being where you discuss the main issues that make up your email communication. If there are documents, pictures, video clips or anything else you want to attach, you just need to click on the ‘attach’ button, select them, then click ‘attach’ for them to be attached. The final step is, of course, to hit the ‘send’ button, so that your email is dispatched to its recipient.

To receive email using your Yahoomail account, you just click on the inbox, and then, with the inbox open, proceed to the email you want to read, click on it, and then wait for it to open. Sometimes, emails that Yahoomail suspects to be ‘spammy’ may be sent to the ‘spam’ folder. If you can’t find an email you were expecting in your inbox, consider looking for it in the spam folder.

You will find a list of all emails you have sent under the ‘sent’ folder.

Having read an email, you can delete it, leave it in your inbox, or create a folder where you can keep it (and other emails of its type) for reference.

Yahoomail.com on mobile

The procedure for using Yahoomail on your mobile phone (or smart phone) is more or less the same, though the interface will tend to look a little bit different. But the essential features of your Yahoomail account remain the same: whether you are access it on your desktop computer, laptop or mobile device.

Of course, to access the Yahoomail on your mobile device, you will have to go the phone’s browser (or WAP) feature. In most cases, to start doing that, you will need to have first received mobile Internet settings from your mobile telephony service provider, and saved them. Otherwise, pretty much everything you can do with your Yahoomail on a computer, you will also be able to do it on your mobile phone.