Yahoo

To create a Yahoo account, visit the Yahoo sign-up page and enter your name, preferred Yahoo email address, password, mobile number, and date of birth. Yahoo will send a verification code by text or call to confirm your phone number, after which your account and Yahoo Mail inbox are active immediately. You can use the same Yahoo ID to sign in to Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, and Yahoo News.

Yahoo's privacy policy describes the categories of personal information Yahoo collects from users, including registration data, communications content, location, device identifiers, and usage data across Yahoo properties. It explains how the information is used for service delivery, personalization, advertising, and security, and how it is shared with affiliates, service providers, and advertising partners. The policy outlines user controls, including the ability to access, delete, or limit use of personal data, and details specific rights for residents of California, Virginia, and other jurisdictions with applicable privacy laws.

No. Free Yahoo Mail accounts were cut from 1 TB to 20 GB on August 27, 2025, and UK/EU free accounts drop to 15 GB on May 5, 2026. Once your mailbox is full, Yahoo will stop accepting new mail and senders get a "mailbox over quota" bounce until you free space or buy more storage.

From a desktop browser, open Settings → More Settings → Storage usage to see what's eating your space; large attachments and Sent/Spam/Trash folders are usually the worst offenders. The current web interface only lets you delete about 100 messages at a time, so plan on multiple passes or filter by sender and use "Select all in this view." Empty Spam and Trash after each pass — those count against your 20 GB until they're cleared. If you have a long-running account with hundreds of thousands of emails, the practical fix many users land on is exporting an archive through Privacy Dashboard → Download your Yahoo data before you start mass-deleting.

Yes, Yahoo uses a third-party verification provider called Intellicheck for some lockout cases, and the policy is documented on Yahoo's help site. That said, only do this on a page whose URL is on yahoo.com or login.yahoo.com — never from a link in an email or text — and never hand control of your phone or screen to anyone who calls claiming to be Yahoo. If the verification keeps failing because the recovery email or phone on file is one you no longer control, Yahoo's automated flow may not resolve it, and users in that situation have reported the only practical path is to start a new account.

For free Yahoo Mail and most other free Yahoo products, there is no public phone support — Yahoo directs free users to help.yahoo.com. Yahoo Plus subscribers (paid) do get phone support at (800) 305-7664 (US/CA), 0808-234-5306 (UK), and 0080066332222 (EU) — those numbers are confirmed on Yahoo's official @YahooCare account. The FTC has warned for years that any "Yahoo customer service" number you find through a generic web search is almost certainly a scam that will try to charge you for free services or take remote control of your computer. Yahoo does not charge for password resets or basic account recovery.

Yahoo had two notable global outages in the last six months — December 22, 2025 and January 21, 2026, when "Edge: Too Many Requests" errors blocked Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, and AOL Mail for under an hour. Before troubleshooting your own account, check Downdetector or Yahoo's @YahooCare account on X for an active incident; Yahoo confirmed the January outage there. If Downdetector is quiet but you specifically can't sync mail to Outlook, Apple Mail, or another app, Yahoo's IMAP servers cap concurrent connections (around 5 per IP), and using too many devices on the same network can trigger sync errors that look like an outage.

ConnectID is Yahoo's email-address-based ad-tracking identifier; instead of cookies, it uses hashed versions of email addresses to recognize users across partner sites like Paramount, Tubi, and NBCUniversal. A federal class action — Caplan v. Yahoo Inc., 1:25-cv-02943 (S.D.N.Y.) — alleges Yahoo tracks users this way without consent, and as of November 2025 Yahoo had asked the court to dismiss; no ruling yet.

Yes. Yahoo's stated policy is that an account inactive for 12 months may be deactivated, and the username can eventually be released and made available to someone else. Yahoo does not guarantee advance warning. If you have an old Yahoo address that's tied to bank, medical, or other recovery flows, log in at least once a year and consider switching critical accounts to an email you actively use.

Yahoo will not release passwords or transfer the account, even to next of kin — the Terms of Service treat all accounts as non-transferable. What you can request: account closure, suspension of paid subscriptions, or, in limited cases, content disclosure. You'll need to mail the request to Yahoo with a US-issued death certificate, the deceased's Yahoo ID, and for content requests, your government ID and proof you're the personal representative or executor. For billing-only matters where you don't have a death certificate, Yahoo lists (866) 265-4025 as a contact line. The process is US-accounts-only; non-US requests aren't accepted via this form.