Learn the Proper Yahoo SMTP Settings for Email

If you use Yahoo email, you've no doubt seen the service's online email portal where you can send, receive, organize, and otherwise interact with your email messages. You're not limited to using this web interface, however; you can use a different client — for example, Outlook or Gmail — to send email through Yahoo's servers. One advantage to setting email up this way is that you can send all your email within a single application, rather than opening multiple clients and apps.

To set up such an application to send mail through Yahoo email, you need to know the SMTP settings.

SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, a standard commonly used for sending email. The standard for receiving email is known as IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) or POP3 (Post Office Protocol version 3).

The SMTP server settings apply to outgoing mail, so they're the same whether you use POP or IMAP for incoming email. In most cases, you enter them in the Settings section of the client's interface when you add the Yahoo account to it (e.g., the Settings section of Gmail). Here's the information you need to enter in the email program you plan to use to send Yahoo Mail: 

• Yahoo Mail SMTP server address: smtp.mail.yahoo.com
• Yahoo Mail SMTP username: Your full Yahoo email address (including @yahoo.com)
• Yahoo Mail SMTP password: Your Yahoo Mail password
• Yahoo Mail SMTP port: 465 or 587
• Yahoo Mail SMTP TLS/SSL required: yes

These settings work with most desktop, mobile, and web email programs and services. After you set up Yahoo Mail in your preferred email client, the mail and your Yahoo folders appear in both locations: in Yahoo and in your preferred app or web interface, such as Gmail.

Yahoo limits the number of outbound emails you can send per day to 500 (each message can go to as many as 100 addresses). In this way, Yahoo prevents large-scale spammers from clogging up its servers.

To download mail from Yahoo Mail to your email program, enter either the Yahoo Mail IMAP or POP3 server settings, whichever is appropriate for your account.