Being able to format your emails has several benefits. It allows you to organize your text better, call attention to the most important things in your message, adapt for contacts who have difficulty reading certain fonts, insert useful links, and add a lot of personality.

Yahoo Mail has several formatting options that help you express your message beautifully. In this tutorial, we’ll go over how to use the most common of them: adding stationary, changing font style and size, adding bold and italics, changing font color, making lists, and inserting links. We’ll also talk about how to quickly remove all formatting and go to plain text.

How to edit format, font and other things in Yahoo Mail

The formatting options are automatically included in a menu at the bottom of every email you compose in Yahoo Mail. So to get started, all you have to do is go to your Yahoo inbox and click the “Compose” button, just as you would for any other email.

Enter the recipient(s) for your email, and subject if you want. Now, if you look at the bottom of the message box, you’ll see that there is a menu with many different formatting options.

Here is a close-up view of the formatting menu. In this tutorial we won’t be discussing indentation or text alignment because they aren’t commonly used for most people in email, but with a little trial and error you should be able to figure them out with no problem if you ever need to use them.

Whether you want to write your message first and then add formatting or do the formatting as you go is completely up to you. For illustration, I’ll write out my whole email first and then add formatting afterwards. Here’s the message with no added formatting.

One cute and unique feature in Yahoo Mail is the ability to add stationary, which turns your email into something really special with just a few clicks. To add stationary, just click on the first icon in the formatting menu after the attachment icon. This will open up a menu for you to choose the stationary that you want.

Browse the different categories and scroll through until you find one you like. If you don’t like any of them, just click anywhere outside the stationary menu to get out of it. I chose this festive stationary with balloons for my BBQ invitation.

How to format font in Yahoo Mail

Next, we’ll change the font style and size. These can both be changed using the second formatting button “Tt”. Select/highlight the text you want to change, and click on the button to open the font options menu. Then select the style and size that you want.

I chose “Classic” style and changed my font size to “Large”.

If you want to bold any text, the process is basically the same as in your word processer. Just select/highlight your desired text, and click on the “B” button.

For italics, same thing. Select the text you want to italicize, then click the “I” button.

Next up is font color. I would recommend to stick with normal black font for formal or business emails, but if you’re inviting people to a BBQ, why not add some fun color? To change the color of your text, highlight it and then click on the font color icon, which is right after the italics icon. Here you can choose the color of the font and the highlight color (you don’t have to use both).

I chose a dark pink that looked cheerful but also easy to read.

If you have a list of items in your email, it can be helpful to the reader if you set them off with bullet points or numbers. To do this, select the text of your list, and click on the lists icon. Then choose a bullet list or numbered list, whichever you feel is most appropriate.

How to add in-line links in Yahoo emails

Adding a link to your emails might not be something you do very often, but it’s nice to know how to do it so you have the option. Have you noticed when you read news online and they mention other news stories in the text of the article, and link to it without actually writing the web address? That’s an in-line link, and it looks cleaner than copy+pasting a URL into your email.

To insert a link, copy the text of your email you want to become the link, then click on the link icon.

This will open a window where you will enter the web address (URL) that you want your text to link to. When you’re done, click “OK”. That’s it!

You can also add smiley faces if you want

Here’s what our whole email looks like with all of the formatting we added.

If for some reason you want to get rid of all of the formatting at once, you can click on the “<<” button, which will convert your email to plain text.

If you hit this by accident, just click “Cancel”. If you really do want to delete all your formatting, click “OK”.

Now your email is plain text, and your formatting menu has disappeared. To get it back, click on the “>>” button, which switches back to rich text.

Your menu is back now, but as you can see, the formatting we had earlier was erased. Back to the drawing board!

Nobody likes their email to get cluttered up with SPAM or junk mail. Yahoo has a built-in spam filter that’s pretty good, but if any junk emails slip past it and into your inbox, you can easily mark is as spam and get rid of it, while simultaneously teaching Yahoo Mail to improve its spam filter.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to mark messages as spam, report spam and suspicious emails to Yahoo, and delete spam permanently from your email.

How to mark messages as spam in Yahoo

To start, make sure you’re logged into your Yahoo account and in your inbox or whichever folder you have messages that you would like to mark as spam.

Remember that marking messages as spam teaches Yahoo that you don’t want to see those emails in your inbox at all – if you just want to delete a wanted message, use the “delete” button, not the “spam” button.

If you have used your Yahoo email address to register on various websites or sign up for newsletters, you may very well already have messages that were sent to the spam folder automatically. Sometimes messages you actually want get sent there by mistake, so if you are ever expecting an email and it never comes, check your Spam folder just in case. You can find it in the left side bar underneath the Archive folder.

To mark an email as spam and send it to the Spam folder from your Inbox, check the box next to the unwanted message (or messages) and then click on the “Spam” button in the options bar at the top of your inbox.

All this does is send the message to the Spam folder and improve Yahoo’s filter so you receive fewer messages like that in the future. If you want to report a sender for being abusive with spam, if you think the email is part of a phishing scam, or if you think your account might have been hacked, there are also options for this. You can find them by clicking the dropdown arrow next to the Spam button and selecting the option that’s appropriate for your situation.

You can also mark a message as spam or report it using the same options while reading the email. With the unwanted message open, you’ll have the same Spam button in the top menu as in your Inbox.

After you click the Spam button, either from the message or from your Inbox, you’ll receive a little notification letting you know your action was successful.

And the spam message will be removed from your Inbox and placed in the Spam folder.

How to mark an email as safe (not spam)

As we mentioned above, sometimes messages that you actually want get sent to spam by mistake. Sometimes we accidentally click on the Spam button ourselves. Whatever the case, if you ever need to get something out of your Spam folder, doing so is easy. Go into the Spam folder in the left navigation bar, check the box next to the desired email or emails, and click “Not Spam” in the options bar. This will move the message back into your Inbox.

How to delete spam emails from Yahoo Mail

Spam is automatically set to be deleted once a month (although you can change this to every week or two weeks in your mail security settings), so there’s not really any need to delete your junk mail manually. However, if you want to for some reason, all you have to do is go into the Spam folder, select the message or messages you want to permanently delete by checking the box next to them, and clicking the “Delete” button.

Now that you know how to label emails as spam in Yahoo Mail, you’re well on your way to having a nice, clean Inbox with only the mail you want to receive. Over time, Yahoo will learn what you consider junk and what you don’t, so you’ll have to go through this process less often. Enjoy your new, spam-free inbox!