Yahoo! Mail Safety Guide

What is Yahoo! Mail?

Yahoo! Mail is a service that lets you send and receive email from any computer with Internet access. A Yahoo! Mail account comes with a calendar, notepad, and address book.

Yahoo!’s younger members might use Yahoo! Mail to communicate with grandparents, friends, or classmates.

To learn more, please read through Yahoo! Mail Help.

What are some risks to my child on Yahoo! Mail?

Yahoo! Mail users are expected to behave in ways that foster community and must abide by the Yahoo! Terms of Service, as well as Yahoo! Mail’s Additional Terms of Service.

Just as there may be risks in the community where you live, the Yahoo! Mail community may pose certain risks to children. Yahoo! Mail provides a number of safety features, but as a parent or caregiver, you are expected to take an active role in protecting your child online.

We suggest that you start by reviewing some general practices for online safety. In addition, please keep the following in mind when your child is using Yahoo! Mail:

• Protecting personal information. If your child exchanges email with unknown users, he or she might divulge personal information. These pieces of information could be used to identify your child’s physical location. As a rule, your child should be wary opening any unsolicited message and not give out any personal information to strangers.
• Harassment. If unknown users contact your child by email, they could expose him or her to unpleasant, sexually suggestive, or abusive language. You and your child should discuss whom to communicate with and whom to ignore.
• Mature content. Yahoo! Mail’s Additional Terms of Service does not permit vulgar or obscene content, but a great deal of spam is meant to promote pornographic web sites. These spam messages often contain adult-oriented images or links to adult web sites. Your child should never click on a link in an email from an unknown sender. Yahoo! Mail provides several features to help limit exposure to mature content.
• Impersonation. Someone could impersonate your child by creating a Yahoo! account and sending damaging emails in your child's name. Please report such abuse to Yahoo!.
• Viruses. Viruses are computer programs that cause harm to 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 safe, your child 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 would otherwise appear in your child’s inbox. Yahoo!’s Anti-Spam Resource Center lists additional tools and tips. What else can be done to limit these risks? Review Yahoo! Mail’s safety features, learn how to report abuse, and read what parents and caregivers can do to help kids be safe on Yahoo! Mail.

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

Yahoo! Mail provides a number of safety features. Many of these features can be accessed by clicking the Options link in the top-right corner of any Yahoo! Mail page. Your child 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 user, that person’s email address can be blocked. All incoming messages from blocked addresses are automatically deleted.
• Block images. Images attached to incoming messages might contain sexually explicit or other inappropriate content. To be safe, use Yahoo! Mail’s block images feature.
• Use filters.Filters automatically sort incoming messages based on rules that you set up. For example, your child could have a filter that automatically puts messages from family members into a folder called Family. Filters can also be created to send unwanted messages directly to the Trash folder. Once you set up filters, they can easily be edited or deleted. Yahoo! Mail provides more information about using filters.
• Use SpamGuard. Yahoo! Mail’s SpamGuard filters out much of the spam that would otherwise appear in your child’s inbox. Visit the Yahoo! Anti-Spam Resource Center for additional tools and tips.
• Mark individual messages as spam. If a message gets past SpamGuard and ends up in your child’s inbox, he or she 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 my child encounters on Yahoo! Mail?

Yahoo! Mail provides 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 help my child use Yahoo! Mail in a safe manner?

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

We suggest that you start by reviewing some general practices for online safety. These include safeguarding identity online, keeping passwords secret, being cautious about contact with strangers, and creating a pledge for online safety.

If your child is 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.

And remember, Yahoo! Kids offers all kinds of age-appropriate content and activities for children under 13.