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!

When you use your Yahoo email account as your primary email address, you’ll find that your inbox gets full pretty quickly and it’s easy to lose track of your most important messages. Luckily, Yahoo has two different ways of saving and keeping track of your important emails, and we’ll show you how to use both methods below, step by step. The first method is called “Archive”, and the second is “Star”.

For both the archive and the star procedure, your first step is to login to your Yahoo account and go to Yahoo Mail main screen by clicking on the “Mail” icon in the upper right-hand corner of the yahoo.com homepage.

How to archive emails in Yahoo

The “Archive” in your Yahoo Mail is like a huge digital filing cabinet where you can store any messages you want to hold onto, just in case, but don’t want them to be cluttering up your inbox all the time. Any message that is archived will not appear in your inbox with your regular email anymore, but will be safely tucked away and accessible anytime you need it by going to the “Archive” section in the side navigation bar in your email.

The archive button is found in your main options panel at the top of your inbox/message view screen.

There are a few different ways you can archive messages in Yahoo Mail, but they are all easy and intuitive and they all have the exact same result: storing a message (or messages) safely in your Archive folder and removing them from your Inbox.

The first way is to archive a single message from your Inbox (or any folder you’ve created in your Yahoo Mail). All you have to do is click on the box next to the message you want to archive, and once it is selected, click on the “Archive” button we mentioned earlier.

You can also archive multiple messages simultaneously. Just check off multiple emails, whichever ones are important and you want to save for later, and then click the “Archive” button just like before.

The last way to archive an important email is directly from the message. Let’s say you get a new message, and as you read it, you realize that you want to save it in the archive in case you need to reference it later. You can save the email by simply clicking on the same “Archive” button while you have the message open.

After you have archived an email or several emails, you’ll get a notification from Yahoo letting you know you did it correctly and giving you the option to undo it if you want. Also note that the email I archived no longer appears in my Inbox. If I want to read it later, I will need to go to the Archive folder.

How to star messages in Yahoo Mail

The second way to save important emails in Yahoo works a little differently than archiving. Sometimes important messages are important because they require somewhat immediate or urgent attention. In this case, moving them to the archive could be a bad move – out of sight, out of mind. Archiving is better suited for messages with important information that you might need to reference at some point in the future, but nothing will happen if you forget about its existence until you need it.

Starring is a better option for saving and highlighting important messages without removing them from your inbox. As the name implies, these messages get marked with a star symbol, so you can find them more easily even if you have tons of emails in your inbox, and you can see at a glance what is urgent and what is not.

As with archiving, there are a few different ways you can go about starring an important message in Yahoo Mail, but they all have the same result: your message will be found in your inbox just like before, but will now have a yellow star next to it as a constant visual reminder of its importance and a sort of bookmark to help you locate it easily.

The first way to star an email in Yahoo is very similar to archiving. First, check the box of the message or messages you want to star. Then, click on the “More…” option in the top menu, and select “Star” from the dropdown menu.

See how your message still appears in your inbox as it normally would, but now it has a star that makes it easier to see?

The second way is even easier. Find the important email you want to save, and hover your cursor over it. Some symbols will appear in black between the sender and the subject: a magnifying glass, a trash can, and a star. To star the message, all you have to do is click on the star. Easy!

The last way is to star an important email as you read it, just like we did with archiving. While you have a message open, if you decide it’s urgent and you want to mark it with a star, just click on the same “More…” button and select “Star” exactly as you did in the first method.

And that’s all there is to saving important messages in Yahoo Mail. If you have an email with information you might want to access in the future, but don’t need to see every day in your regular email, archiving is your solution. For emails that require urgent attention but might get lost in a crowded inbox, starring is the answer to your problem. And luckily for all of us, archiving and starring important emails in Yahoo couldn’t be easier.