Yahoo! Mail Quick Start
| Introducing Yahoo! Mail Classic | Getting to Yahoo! Mail | Yahoo! Mail and Your Yahoo! Contacts | Sending a Message | Reading a Message | What Happens With Sent and Received Messages? |
What Happens With Sent and Received Messages?
Simply put, you use Yahoo! Mail to send and receive email messages. There’s really nothing to it, but you might like to know what happens to the messages you send and receive.
Sending Messages
When you send an email message—be it new, a reply, or forwarded—Yahoo! Mail delivers
it to the email addresses you specify and saves a copy in your Sent folder. You
can move messages from the Sent folder into any other folder. This
is useful, for example, when you keep all the messages related to
a particular topic—both those you receive and those you send—together
in one place. 
If you don’t want Mail to keep a copy of every message you send, you can change this behavior on the Options page, as described in the Customizing Yahoo! Mail tutorial. Then, to save a copy of a specific outgoing message, just include your own email address in one of the address boxes when you compose the message. When you send the message, Yahoo! Mail delivers it to your friends and to you, too.
Receiving Messages
Initially, Yahoo! Mail delivers most of the messages you receive
into your Inbox. Those suspected to be junk might be delivered to
your Spam folder. You can customize Mail
to direct specific types of emails to folders of your choice.
As you receive email, Yahoo! Mail uses icons to give you more information about messages in your mail folders.
Unread messages appear in bold text and read messages appear in normal text.
You can mark a message as read or unread by checking the box next to the message, and then selecting Mark as Read or Mark as Unread from the Mark menu.
Icons scattered around a mail folder and in open email messages provide further information at a glance.
In a mail folder, you could see these icons:
You forwarded this email message. 
You replied to this email message. 
This message is an event alert from your Yahoo! Calendar. 
You flagged this email message for follow up. To unflag the message, click the icon. 
This message is not flagged. To flag the message, click the dot. 
This email message includes one or more attachments. In a specific email message, you could see these icons:
You flagged this email message for follow up. To unflag the message, click the icon. 
This message is not flagged. To flag the message, click the icon. 
Verifies that the message is being sent from its claimed domain, such as "@yahoo.com". 
This person is in your Yahoo! Contacts. Click the icon to view the contact’s details. 
This person is not in your Yahoo! Contacts. Click the icon to add his or her information to your address book. This email message includes one or more attached files.
What’s Next
That’s it! You’re ready to send and receive emails with the best of them. You’ve learned the basics, why not find out what else you can do in Yahoo! Mail by taking a look at all of our tutorials?
Words to Know
- Attachment: a separate file included as part of an email message; for example, a multimedia or document file.
- Folder: a container that holds individual elements specific to the context; for example, email messages in Yahoo! Mail.
- Inbox: a folder where you receive incoming email.