Managing Your Mailbox
| Working With Folders | Creating Folders | Moving Messages | Sorting Messages | Deleting Messages | Renaming and Deleting Folders |
Working With Folders
Looking to keep better tabs on your messages? You’re in luck. Yahoo! Mail folders make it easy to organize those incoming and outgoing messages.
Yahoo! Mail stores all your messages for as long as you have your Yahoo! Mail account, no matter what folder they’re in (with the exception of Trash and Spam)—and there’s no limit to the number of messages that you can save.
On first glance you’ll notice that your mailbox has five special-purpose, permanent folders that you can’t remove or rename:
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Inbox—Unless you tell us otherwise, all incoming messages automatically go to your Inbox folder (except suspected spam). You can read your mail in the Inbox, then delete it, move it to another folder, or leave it in the Inbox. -
Drafts—The Drafts folder holds messages that you’ve composed but haven’t sent yet. A message saved in your Drafts folder stays there until you either send it or delete it. 
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Sent—You have the option of saving copies of the email messages you’ve sent in your Sent folder. This makes it simple for you to review or resend the message if necessary. -
Trash—When you delete messages in Yahoo! Mail, they’re moved to the Trash folder. But remember that messages in your Trash folder can be deleted at any time without warning. So don’t put them in the Trash if you want them later. You can also empty the Trash folder yourself. Once messages are emptied from the Trash folder, they are permanently deleted from the Yahoo! Mail server and can’t be recovered. -
Spam—The first time you get a message that SpamGuard considers junk mail, it creates an additional permanent folder called Spam, where it stores these messages.
With this in mind, you’ll see that it’s easy to view the contents of any folder in your Yahoo! Mail account.
Here’s How
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Go to your Yahoo! Mail Inbox. (Remind me how.)
A list of all your folders appears on the left side of the page, and the messages in your Inbox folder appear on the right.
A number next to a folder’s name tells you the number of unread messages in that folder.
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Click the name of a folder to see its contents.
A list of messages in that folder appears in the summary area on the right.
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To display a message in the Reading Pane (the area below the list of messages), click the desired message in the list of messages.
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To close a mail folder (that is, to no longer display the messages it contains), click the name of a different folder.
What’s Next
In addition to permanent folders, you can create personal folders for organizing your email messages.
Words to Know
- Folder: a container that holds individual elements specific to the context; for example, email messages in Yahoo! Mail.
- Junk mail: unsolicited email on the Internet; also called spam.
- Permanent folder: a mail folder that is automatically created in a Yahoo! Mail account and can’t be deleted.
- Spam: unsolicited email on the Internet; also called "junk mail".