Updated February 18, 2012
How to Set Up a Yahoo Outlook Connection for Your Email
Let’s talk about how to make a Yahoo Outlook 2010 connection. That is, let’s go through the process of setting up a Yahoo Mail account and Outlook 2010 to work together. First, let’s talk about why you might want to do this.
NOTE: If you are using an earlier version of Outlook, you should follow the link at the end of this page to get instructions that cover that version.
Creating a Yahoo Outlook 2010 connection like this will make your life easier, since it lets you work with all of your mail in one place. Checking your mail in two different places makes no sense when you can get it all right in Outlook.
We’re almost ready to start. But before we go any further, here’s an important point: You can only make this Yahoo Outlook 2010 connection if you have a premium Yahoo mail account. In other words, you must be using either a:
- Yahoo! Mail Plus account
($19.99 per year)
- 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 don’t worry. This is easy to fix. And the benefits of a Yahoo Outlook 2010 connection make it worthwhile to do so.
Convert Your Yahoo Mail Account to Yahoo! Mail Plus to Enable the Yahoo Outlook 2010 Connection
Converting a free Yahoo account to a Mail Plus account is easy and inexpensive at less than $1.67 a month.
THIS LINK opens a new window that walks you through the Mail Plus upgrade process. Be sure to return to this page once you have upgraded your account so we can configure a Yahoo Outlook 2010 connection to work with it.
Whether you choose to use Yahoo! Mail Plus or Yahoo! Business Mail, the steps needed to make the Yahoo Outlook 2010 hookup are almost the same. The following section walks you through the process:
NOTE: As part of the process for setting up a Yahoo Outlook 2010 connection, you will tell the Yahoo mail servers not to keep copies of messages on the server once you view them with Outlook. This means they will not be visible from the Web once you read them with Outlook. This is most likely the way you want things to work anyway (having multiple versions of a message floating around is a recipe for confusion), but is something to be aware of.
Configure Your Yahoo Outlook 2010 Connection
We are going to set up our Yahoo Outlook 2010 connection manually to be sure we get everything exactly the way we want it. The procedure is similar, but not identical to configuring earlier versions of Outlook. Please follow these steps to get Outlook configured:
- In the Outlook main window, click the File tab on the ribbon, then Info, then Add Account. This opens the Auto Account Setup screen.
- Set the Manually configure server settings or additional server types checkbox and click Next to go to the Choose Service screen.
- Select Internet E-mail, then click Next to go to the Internet E-mail Settings screen.
- Enter your name as you want it to appear in messages in the Your Name field.
- Enter your full Mail Plus address ([email protected]) or Business Mail address (for example, [email protected]) in the E-mail Address field.
- Select POP3 in the Account Type list.
- For a Mail Plus account, enter plus.pop.mail.yahoo.com in the Incoming mail server (POP3) field and plus.smtp.mail.yahoo.com in the Outgoing mail server (SMTP) field. For a Business Mail account, enter pop.bizmail.yahoo.com in the Incoming mail server field and smtp.bizmail.yahoo.com in the Outgoing mail server (SMTP) field.
- Enter your Yahoo user name in the User Name field. For a Mail Plus account, enter your mail address without the “@yahoo.com”. For a Business Mail account, enter your mail address including the “@yourdomain.com”.
- Enter your Yahoo Mail password in the Password field.
- Set the Remember password checkbox if you don’t want to have to enter your password manually each time Outlook checks your mail.
- Make sure that the checkbox next to Require logon using Secure Password Authentication (SPA) is CLEARED.
- Under the “Deliver new messages to” heading, select New Outlook Data File to store your Yahoo messages separate from your other messages. The messages will appear in the Inbox just like all the rest of your Outlook mail, but won’t be stored with your other (corporate?) messages on the server.
- Click More Settings to open the Internet E-mail Settings dialog box.
- Click the Outgoing Server tab.
- Set the My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication checkbox.
- Select Use same settings as my incoming mail server.
- Click the Advanced tab.
- Clear the Leave a copy of messages on the server checkbox.
- Enter 995 in the Incoming server (POP3) box.
- Set the This server requires an encrypted connection (SSL) checkbox under Incoming server (POP3).
- Enter 465 in the Outgoing server (SMTP) box.
- Select SSL in the “Use the following type of encrypted connection” box under Outgoing server (SMTP)
- Click OK to return to the Internet E-mail Settings screen.
- Click Test Account Settings. The Test Account Settings dialog box appears and Outlook sends a test message using the settings you have just entered. If the test was successful, a Congratulations! message appears in the dialog box. Your Yahoo Outlook 2010 connection is set up properly. Click Close to close this dialog box. If you didn’t see the Congratulations! message, go back through this procedure from the top to check all your settings.
- Click Next, then Finish.
NOTE: If the test shows that you can receive messages fine, but you can’t send them, the problem is often caused by factors outside the Yahoo Outlook 2010 POP3 connection you just set up. I’ve posted instructions for troubleshooting that kind of problem on the Can’t Send Email page.
Now you’re ready to go. You should have a functional Yahoo Outlook 2010 connection, and Outlook should start downloading mail from your Yahoo account.
From here you can:
Return to the top of this Yahoo Outlook page.
Learn how to import your Yahoo Contacts to Outlook 2010.
Learn how to highlight Yahoo messages in your Inbox.
Go to our main Yahoo Outlook connection page.
Go to the main Outlook 2010 email accounts page.
Go to the Outlook 2010 home page.
Go to the instructions for setting up a Yahoo Mail Outlook connection for earlier versions of Outlook.
Find more info…
Related posts:
- The Yahoo Outlook 2010 Connection – Problems People Have When They Configure Outlook 2010 for Yahoo Mail
- How to Use Yahoo Mail and Outlook Together for Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, and Outlook 2010
- Yahoo Outlook – Configure Outlook for Yahoo Mail & More
- How to Configure Outlook 2010 For Yahoo In Minutes
- 3 Top Reasons to Configure Outlook 2010 for Yahoo Access
Joey,
That’s great to hear. I haven’t tried the setup you have. My Yahoo mail goes to a hosted Exchange server, and I connect everything to that. Connecting a smartphone like you have adds a little twist to things since Yahoo mail seems to work differently for smartphones versus desktop devices.
Thanks for updating us on your progress.
–Bill
Hi Bill,
I think I figured it out. I should have been paying attention to the options I was selecting rather than just blindly copying your instructions. I made the tweaks needed, and it seems to be working . . . . at least so far, so good.
Thanks again for your great instructions.
Hi Bill,
Great instructions for connecting Yahoo email to Outlook. Everything worked like a charm!
I have a question. Is it possible to keep a copy of my inbox in both Yahoo and Outlook where I can delete emails from my inbox in Outlook and it automatically deletes in Yahoo? The reason that I ask is that I like to be able to see my Yahoo inbox on my smartphone. I use Outlook on my laptop to manage my calendar using email invitations from friends using Outlook as well as to manage email when I’m at my laptop.
Thanks in advance for your response.
[...] I know exactly where you can find quality directions to configure Outlook 2010 for Yahoo Mail. As you’ll see from the comments on the site, many people have already created a Yahoo POP3 connection to Outlook 2010 with them. Get started right now by visiting this page: http://living-with-outlook-2010.com/emailaccounts/2010/06/the-yahoo-outlook-2010-connection/ [...]
Thank you Christie! I am both an instructor and tech writer. Too much of the material online is written by techies, for techies, leaving normal people totally bewildered. I see my job to be making this stuff understandable and as easy as possible to work with. It shouldn’t require a degree in computer science to be able to view your Yahoo Mail in Outlook!
–Bill
This was the BEST accurate information I have ever looked up! This was so helpful and made easy to follow. I am so impressed! Are you an instructor or technical writer? Thank you for this very helpful information!!
[...] Here’s a link to a site that I know has helped hundreds of people successfully set up a Yahoo Mail Outlook 2010 connection: [...]
Sage Brink…
A round of applause for your blog post.Really looking forward to read more. Awesome….
Montana Spiker…
Very informative article post.Thanks Again. Want more….
THANK YOU! This was an excellent fix. Absolutely nothing I could find on Yahoo’s sites would work. Again, thanks!
Kate,
People in certain countries don’t have to pay, but most of us do. Heaven knows why.
–Bill
Australian users don’t need to pay for POP access, i’m surprised anyone needs to. It’s always been free for me.
That’s excellent. Now we have a couple of possible solutions to these Yahoo problem. Hopefully they will be enough until the underlying problems are fixed.
EUREKA!
Thank you, thank you, thank you dblr40!!
I have had this same problem fror DAYS, and I tried every single suggestion on here and various other sites. It WAS the special character in my password that was creating the problem. Yahoo should fix this. They themselves recommend the use of special characters in passwords, and it is generally a good idea. My Yahoo account was hacked last year.
I’ve discovered that something similar happened to Mac users a month or so ago.
According to the thread, if you disable SSL for incoming and outgoing servers, then set the Incoming server port to 110 and the Outgoing server port to “Default” the connection will work again. I assume that on the Outlook side, this last bit translates to going to the Advanced tab in the Internet E-mail Settings dialog box, and clicking the Use Defaults button. I can’t test this as my connection is working fine.
If any of you give this a try, please report your results back here. Whatever is going on appears to be on the Yahoo side and fairly widespread, so anything you can share could help lots of people.
Thanks,
–Bill
Don,
You can’t get the folders into Outlook. Yahoo uses the POP3 protocol for connecting to PCs, which allows Outlook to copy messages out of the Yahoo Mail Inbox, but that’s it. Yahoo would have to switch to a different email protocol to support copying the folders or their contents, and that is unlikely at this point.
–Bill
I was able to send and receive yahoo mail from Outloook. When I performed the send and receive Outlook acquired all of my open Yahoo mail, but it did not bring in my mail folders. How do I get the yahoo folders into Outlook?
Thanks for the info. There seems to be a lot of people having problems with their Yahoo Mail to Outlook connection recently.
I started having problems with OUTLOOK 2010 downloading email from yahoo. OUTLOOK kept telling me my yahoo password was bad. I changed my password to the recommended yahoo password with special characters. That made it worse could not send or receive. I took the special character out of the password 2 nights ago so far so good. FIXED MY PROBLEM so far. It is possible the special character modified the code that OUTLOOK sends to yahoo. Hope this helps some one.
I haven’t seen the User ID/Password problem, but yesterday Outlook suddenly informed me that it wasn’t activated. I went through the activation process again and all is now well, but neither I or the support guy could figure out why it suddenly decided it wasn’t registered. Is Outlook still acting up for you?
–Bill
Starting about 4 days ago, Outlook 2010 is prompting me for my Yahoo credentials. The pop-up is pre-populated with my username and password so all I have to do is click OK and it connects. This happens when OL has been running for hours and happens continuously. I checked my connection settings with the values you have above, then tested the connection (which connected and sent the test message).
I have had OL configured for accessing my Yahoo plus mailbox for more than a year and this pop-up just started out the blue. I am able to login to my mailbox via the browser without issue.
Anyone else having this issue?
Thanks,
Tony
Seems for the past 3-4 days, my Outlook has been showing me the UserID and Password screen for connecting to Yahoo! plus mail via pop3. When this happens I usually don’t do anything because I know it’s on Yahoo! end; as always.
However, this has been going on for too long now. Do you or anyone know of anything going on at Yahoo! Have the settings changed any? I know my settings are correct and were verified with this webpage, but maybe something changed very recently.
Anyone having problems???
Trajan,
Is this problem still going on? I’m not seeing that kind of problem, even when logging on through multiple service providers in different areas, and I haven’t gotten any other reports of similar problems. Are you using the same ISP for all the tests? Perhaps they changed something on their end?
–Bill
Thank you a million times over! You are a life saver!!!
No, there’s something more problematic going on. I have been using Outlook with Yahoo Plus for quite a long time, and several weeks ago sending mail stopped working, with the “connection to the server interrupted” error. I can still receive mail (POP), but cannot send it (SMTP). Outlook works perfectly when sending through other POP/SMTP providers. Furthermore, I can get Thunderbird to send mail with Yahoo from the same computer, so I know it is not an ISP port-blocking issue. Finally, I have tried using Outlook on a different computer, and also on a different Internet connection, both of which also failed. So there is something suddenly failing in the Outlook/Yahoo SMTP server interaction. I suspected an Outlook update broke something, but further experimentation has shown other broken clients, like Opera Mail, even though some other mail clients still work (Thunderbird and The Bat!, for instance). I think Yahoo changed something in the way their servers react to an incoming connection, maybe in the encryption negotiation or something (or supporting SSL vs. TLS), and it throws some clients off.
It sounds like your ISP is blocking you from sending. They do this to prevent spammers from using their network, but it can mess up regular folks like you and me. The information on these Can’t Send Email pages may help.
Raj,
The POP3 protocol that Yahoo supports only allows Outlook to download copies of messages from your Yahoo Mail Plus account to the Outlook Inbox. It doesn’t support updating the Sent Items folder or any of the folders with information from Yahoo. This is a limitation of the protocol itself, and not something we can fix or work around.
–Bill
I have successfully updated and attached outlook, but when outlook updates it only updates the Inbox folder. The sent folder doesn’t update.
Can you please help me with the same.???
or someone suggest a solution to fix it??
… I am getting the following error message in Outlook:
Task ‘[email protected] – Sending’ reported error (0x800CCC0F) : ‘The connection to the server was interrupted. If this problem continues, contact your server administrator or Internet service provider (ISP).’
Bill
I tried everyting that you had in your link:
http://living-with-outlook-2010.com/emailaccounts/2010/06/the-yahoo-outlook-2010-connection/
But still cannot send Yahoo mail from my Outlook 2010 client. I even tried the following:
1) Do this on another computer running windows xp (my computer is running windows 7) setup Outlook and my account information, try to send, no luck
2) Do this at my brothers house, my ISP is ATT his ISP is Comcast, no luck.
Again, I can receive mail fine but cannot send.
Any other thoughts?
DT,
Everything seems to be working fine for me. Anyone else seeing issues like this?
You might want to check the advice on this page. It may help you track down the problem:
http://living-with-outlook-2010.com/emailaccounts/2011/02/cant-send-email-anymore/
Everyting was fine on Monday and since then I cannot send mail. Anyone know if this is a Yahoo problem?
I tried everyting and still cant send mail. Anyone still having send issues? Please help.
Kristina,
I’m so happy you found this site before you jumped! It is so awkward having to explain what happened when you arrive at the hospital.
Thank you for you kind words and have a great day!
–Bill
God bless you! I’ve just found your blog and you saved me from leaping from a one story house!!! lol … I have it working now after hours of tinkering and tears … you are a techie and a fine gentleman!
Hey!!! its worked….thanks
Andy,
I’m happy to hear it. Enjoy!
–Bill
It worked!! Finally! Thanks!!
Dave,
You seem kind of confused about how all this works. The common types of connection available to tie webmail services like Yahoo and GMX to Outlook are POP3 and IMAP (MAPI is a Microsoft-specific protocol not normally used by third parties). Yahoo supports POP3 for applications like Outlook and IMAP for mobile devices.
Some people have said that they could get IMAP working with Outlook using the settings for mobile devices, but that it does not make a reliable connection. Others have said that they cannot make the connection work at all.
Mail services like GMX, which you are using, do officially support an IMAP connection to Outlook which is why you find GMX Outlook 2010 IMAP instructions on this site, but Yahoo does not.
I hope this clears up the confusion.
–Bill
WOW!!!! you succesfully setup out look to use POP3 via SSL/TLS – this was not broken . WHat you didndt do was set up outlook to use a MAPI connection ….that is the problem we are having I want to connect with MAPI not POP …. Mapi allows the folder sttructures and mail to have status – Read Not Read etc …. acount using
-D
Hey I HAD the same problem. Be persistent I just went back and fourth with that ssl thing checked then cleared making sure to # Set the “This server requires an encrypted connection (SSL)” check-box under Incoming server (POP3).
Then it started working as normal with all settings exactly as described above.
Hope this helps … BE PERSISTENT !! Take not when I unchecked ssl box incoming reverted back 110 default keep an Eye Out.
I turned SSL back on and am receiving mail. I hope the fix is stable!
Thanks all.
Diane,
Give it another shot. I just sent a series of test messages from different accounts and all made it through fine. It looks like they have a fix for this at last!
–Bill
I tried Rhonda’s fix and it didn’t work. Outlook said my username and password weren’t correct. Even logged back into Yahoo to make sure I had it right, which I did, and it wouldn’t work. Tried about 5 times before I gave up. Am really frustrated as I use Outlook to organize my emails, and while I can see them in yahoo, haven’t been able to do anything with them except delete the ones I don’t want.
Sorry, just letting out some frustration.
Diane
11:20 p.m. EDT After several tweets and emails with Yahoo Customer Care, I arbitrarily did a send/receive in Outlook and 2.5 days worth of emails came flooding in! I didn’t change anything, so evidently they did something on their end. I had to provide them with both account user names. Anyone else?
Thank you everyone for your feedback on how this is working. I think the information will be invaluable to everyone posting here, as well as to all the folks who are just poking their heads in to see what’s going on.
The fix suggested by Rhoda worked for me, but there is a good reason why there was originally security set up for the incoming server. I don’t use yahoo for sensitive info, so the security issue is not very big for me.
The temporary fix described by Rhoda (recent post) doesn’t work for me. After changing the SSL settings, I’m still unable to access my email as of 7:00 p.m. (EDT). It’s now been over 48 hours. They really should send something to our Yahoo mail to let us know what’s going on.
The temporary fix described by Rhoda doesn’t work for me. I still can’t receive my emails; over 48 hours now
Everything has been working then starting late Wednesday I cannot receive any yahoo mail. I can send it, but not receive it. Did any of the settings get changed by yahoo? Using Outlook 2010.