What is Yahoo! Mail?

Yahoo! Mail is an email service that lets you communicate easily and stay up-to-date with friends and family from any computer or mobile device with Internet access.

What are some potential risks on Yahoo! Mail?

Everyone using Yahoo! Mail must follow the Yahoo! Terms of Service, as well as Yahoo! Mail’s Additional Terms of Service.

Just as there may be risks in the town where you live, the Yahoo! Mail community may pose risks, such as receiving unwelcome messages. Yahoo! Mail has many safety features, but knowing how to protect yourself is important too.

Start with our general tips for online safety, and remember these safety tips when you use Yahoo! Mail:

• Protect personal information. If you exchange email with strangers, you might reveal personal information that could be used to identify your physical location. Avoid opening unsolicited messages, and don't give personal information to strangers.
• Report harassment. If strangers email or try to start an IM conversation with you, they could expose you to unpleasant, sexually suggestive, or abusive language. Think carefully about whom you want to communicate with and whom to ignore.
• Report mature content. Yahoo! Mail’s Additional Terms of Service does not permit vulgar or obscene content, but often, spam messages promotes pornographic websites that often contain adult-oriented images or links to adult websites. Never click a link in an email from someone you don't know.
• Be aware of impersonation. Someone could impersonate you by creating a Yahoo! account and sending damaging emails in your name. Please report such abuse to Yahoo!.
• Think before you open. Viruses are computer programs that harm software, data, and/or hardware. Viruses can arrive in email, so Yahoo! Mail has free, automatic virus scanning and cleaning, but not all viruses can be detected. To be safer, never open emails or attachments from strangers.
• Chat. Yahoo! Mail’s chat feature lets you and your contact exchange messages in real time. Yahoo! members under the age of 18 are not permitted to use chat. In online chat you could encounter unpleasant, sexually suggestive, or abusive language, and chat opens you up to people who might try to contact you by phone or in person.

To further limit these risks, review Yahoo! Mail’s safety features, learn how to report abuse, and ask your family and friends for help staying safer using Yahoo! Mail.

What safety features can help protect me on Yahoo! Mail?

Many of Yahoo! Mail’s safety features can be found by clicking on Help at the top of any Mail page. Here are some additional features and tips to help you stay safer when using Yahoo! Mail.

• Delete messages. This is the easiest way to get rid of offensive or suspicious messages.
• Block an address. If offensive messages continue to arrive from the same person, that person’s email address can be blocked. Incoming messages from blocked addresses are automatically deleted before you see them.
• Block images. Images attached to incoming messages might contain sexually explicit or other inappropriate content. To be safer, use Yahoo! Mail’s block images feature.
• Use filters. Filters automatically sort incoming messages based on rules that you set. For example, you could have a filter that automatically puts messages from family members into a “Family” folder. You can also create filters to send unwanted messages directly to the trash. Once you set up filters, you can easily edit or delete them.
• Use SpamGuard. Yahoo! Mail’s SpamGuard filters out a lot of spam that could appear in your Inbox.
• Mark individual messages as spam. If a spam message gets past SpamGuard and into your Inbox, mark it manually as spam. This deletes the message and trains SpamGuard to recognize similar future messages.

Explore your Yahoo! Pulse Updates settings.

Yahoo! Mail is integrated with Yahoo! Pulse which provides a stream of people’s activity, based largely on public content they’ve created on Yahoo!. In Yahoo! Mail, you can see updates from some of your Yahoo! contacts, in addition to your Pulse connections.

Check your Yahoo! Pulse settings so that you know who can see what you’re publishing. Our defaults let anyone over 18 years of age see what you publish. We have different age-appropriate defaults for people under 18.

You can easily limit who sees your Updates stream either by editing the controls for each specific activity (for instance, sharing photos on Flickr or commenting on Yahoo! News articles) or by turning your Updates stream off entirely in one step.

How can I report problems on Yahoo! Mail?

Yahoo! Mail has a customer care form to report abuse related to email harassment or impersonation. Please use this form to report violations of the Yahoo! Terms of Service or Yahoo! Mail Additional Terms of Service. Make sure to provide specific information about the sender and content of the offending message.

Yahoo!’s Customer Care team takes appropriate action as necessary, which may include deactivating an abuser’s account. Reports that indicate activity involving child pornography or solicitation of a minor are dealt with promptly by Yahoo!’s legal team and, when appropriate, reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

What can I do to use Yahoo! Mail in a safer manner?

Yahoo! is committed to providing a safer online experience for all everyone and, accordingly, complies with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Yahoo! Mail provides a number of safety features to limit potential risks. However, protecting young people online is a responsibility shared with parents, teachers, and other caregivers.

Start by reviewing general tips for online safety These include safeguarding your identity online, keeping passwords secret, being cautious about contact with strangers, and creating a family pledge for online safety.

If you are exposed to obscene language, mature content, threats of physical violence, harassment, or anything else that violates the, please report the abuse.