Yahoo! Hacks

Navigate Yahoo! Mail

Find your way around the Yahoo! Mail interface, and speed up common tasks with keyboard shortcuts.

Yahoo! Mail has been a runaway success because it’s easy to use. Web-based email gives users an account they can access from any machine with an Internet connection. You don’t have to know how to configure an email client such as Outlook to use Yahoo! Mail; you just need to know how to use a browser. You won’t have any trouble using Yahoo! Mail to send messages across the Internet, but by taking a few minutes to learn how Yahoo! Mail is organized, you might find ways to speed up the way you send email.

Yahoo! Mail Layout

You can get to your Yahoo! Mail by browsing to http://mail.yahoo.com. You can also type mail! into any Yahoo! Search form to go directly to Yahoo! Mail. This even works from external search forms, such as the Firefox Quick Search Box [Hack #13] .

Tip

In addition to using the mail! shortcut, you can get to most Yahoo! properties by typing the property’s name into a Yahoo! search form and adding an exclamation point. Try others, such as directory!, finance!, tv!, and movies!.

Yahoo! Mail is really four applications in one, and here’s a quick look at how you can use each of them:

Mail

As you’d expect, this is the heart of the application, where you can read and send email via your web browser.

Addresses

This is your personal address book, where you can store not only a contact name and email address, but also phone numbers, home and work addresses, birthdays ...