Yahoo! Mail Safety Guide

What is Yahoo! Mail?

Yahoo! Mail lets you send and receive email from any computer with Internet access. A Yahoo! Mail account also includes a calendar, notepad, and address book, as well as special access to your closest connections

You can use Yahoo! Mail to communicate with family, friends, or classmates.

To learn more, check out the Yahoo! Mail Help.

What are some potential risks on Yahoo! Mail?

Everyone using Yahoo! Mail must follow the Yahoo! Terms of Service, as well as Yahoo! Mail’s Additional Terms of Service.

Just as there may be risks in the town where you live, the Yahoo! Mail community may pose certain risks. Yahoo! Mail has safety features, but you have to take care of yourself online too.

Start with our general tips for online safety. Then, on Yahoo! Mail, keep these things in mind:

• Protect personal information. If you exchange email with unknown people, you might reveal personal information. This information could be used to identify your physical location. As a rule, avoid opening any unsolicited message and don't give out any personal information to strangers.
• Harassment. If strangers contact you by email, they could expose you to unpleasant, sexually suggestive, or abusive language. Think carefully about who you want to communicate with and who to ignore.
• Mature content. Yahoo! Mail’s Additional Terms of Service does not permit vulgar or obscene content, but a lot of spam promotes pornographic web sites. These spam messages often contain adult-oriented images or links to adult web sites. Never click on a link in an email from someone you don't know. Yahoo! Mail has several features to help limit exposure to mature content.
• Impersonation. Someone could impersonate you by creating a Yahoo! account and sending damaging emails in your name. Please report such abuse to Yahoo!.
• Viruses. Viruses are computer programs that harm software, data, and/or hardware. Viruses can arrive in email attachments, so Yahoo! Mail provides free, automatic virus scanning and cleaning. However, not all viruses can be detected and cleaned. To be safer, you should never open emails or attachments from strangers.

Many viruses, phishing attempts, and sexually explicit messages are sent as spam. Yahoo! Mail’s SpamGuard offers an easy and automated way to filter out much of the spam that could appear in your inbox. Yahoo!’s Anti-Spam Resource Center lists more tools and tips. What else can you do to limit these risks? Review Yahoo! Mail’s safety features, learn how to report abuse, and ask your parents or caregivers o for help staying safer using Yahoo! Mail.

What safety features should I know about to help protect myself on Yahoo! Mail?

Yahoo! Mail has a number of safety features. Many of these features can be found by clicking the Options link in the top-right corner of any Yahoo! Mail page. You should know how to do the following:

• Delete messages. The easiest way to get rid of an offensive or suspicious message is simply to delete it.
• Block an address. If offensive messages continue to arrive from the same person, that email address can be blocked. All incoming messages from blocked addresses are automatically deleted before you see them.
• Block images. Images attached to incoming messages might contain sexually explicit or other inappropriate content. To be safer, use Yahoo! Mail’s block images feature.
• Use filters.Filters automatically sort incoming messages based on rules that you set up. For example, your could have a filter that automatically puts messages from family members into a folder called "Family." You can also create filters to send unwanted messages directly to the Trash folder. Once you set up filters, you can easily edit or delete them. Yahoo! Mail Help has more information about using filters.
• Use SpamGuard. Yahoo! Mail’s SpamGuard filters out a lot of spam that could appear in your inbox. Visit the Yahoo! Anti-Spam Resource Center for more tools and tips.
• Mark individual messages as spam. If a message gets past SpamGuard and ends up in your inbox, you can manually mark it as spam. This deletes the message and trains the SpamGuard filter to recognize similar messages in the future.

Please report any inappropriate contact or offensive communication with other Yahoo! Mail users.

How can I report problems that happen on Yahoo! Mail?

Yahoo! Mail has a customer care form to report abuse related to email harassment or impersonation. Please use this form to report violations of the Yahoo! Terms of Service or Yahoo! Mail Additional Terms of Service. Make sure to provide specific information about the sender and content of the offending message.

Yahoo!’s customer care team receives abuse reports and takes appropriate action as necessary, which may include deactivating an abuser’s account. Reports that indicate activity involving child pornography or solicitation of a minor are dealt with promptly by Yahoo!’s legal team and, when appropriate, reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

What can I do to use Yahoo! Mail in a safer manner?

Yahoo! is committed to providing a safer online experience for all everyone and, accordingly, complies with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Yahoo! Mail provides a number of safety features to limit potential risks. However, protecting young people online is a responsibility shared with parents, teachers, and other caregivers.

Start by reviewing some general tips for online safety. These include safeguarding identity online, keeping passwords secret, being cautious about contact with strangers, and creating a family pledge for online safety.

If you are exposed to obscene language, mature content, threats of physical violence, harassment, or anything else that violates the Yahoo! Terms of Service or Yahoo! Mail Additional Terms of Service, please report the abuse.