BKC Solutions Corner

Do you have a Yahoo Mail account you would like to or need to use with Outlook? If so, 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 convenience of having access to all your mail messages 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.

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)

If you don’t have one of these account types, you cannot connect Yahoo Mail and Outlook. But its easy to convert 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/ opens a new window that walks you through the Mail Plus upgrade process. Close the new window once you’re done with the upgrade so we can configure Outlook to work with your Yahoo Mail Plus account. 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, there’s one thing you should know. As part of the process for configuring Yahoo mail with Outlook you will tell 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. 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 detailed procedure you have to follow to complete the configuration depend on the particular version of Outlook you have. 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 on the Living With Outlook (http://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