Create a Yahoo email account (new Yahoo Mail email address)

The first step is to signup to create a new Yahoo account: once you have an account, your Yahoo user name automatically becomes your email address user name (the part of the email address that comes before "@yahoo.com"). If you already have an account with Yahoo, you have two choices: either sign up for a new account (as explained in this tutorial) to get a new email address of your choice, or use your existing Yahoo user name to sign in to Yahoo Mail.

Pick a new Yahoo email address

1. Tips on picking a good email address: Your email address is used all the time, and for convenience's sake, you will likely keep that email address for years to come: this is why you should give some careful consideration when choosing a user name for your new Yahoo email address. Something that may seem "cute" or funny today, may play against you in the future, for example when you use your Yahoo Mail account to apply for a job.

2. Should you include your name in your new email address? On the other hand, there are some benefits in not including your last name in your email address, since you may not necessarily want to divulge your last name to all your email recipients.

Go sign up for your new email address

Now that you have determined that you want to create a new email address, possibly as opposed to using your current Yahoo account, go to mail.yahoo.com -  this is also the link you will use when you want to login to your Yahoo account to check your emails.

Once you are on that page, look for the "Don't have a Yahoo ID?" header below the login form. Then, click on the Sign Up link to load the form you will fill in to create a new account. This simple form only gathers basic information needed to setup your account, like display name for your emails, gender, etc.

Enter your profile information

In the first part of the form, Yahoo collects the information that will be used for various purposes, some of them purely marketing. Under Name, enter your first name and last name as you would like them to appear to your email recipients; in other words, while you can change your display name later on, this piece of information will until then be used when you send emails. Your Birthday, Country, and Postal Code are mostly used to properly target ads and free content Yahoo supplies throughout its various websites:

Since your Yahoo Mail profile is the same profile you use for other Yahoo-owned website (like Yahoo Answers), make sure that they do accurately reflect who you are.

Choose a new Yahoo Mail email address

One of the downsides to using a webmail service as popular worldwide as Yahoo Mail is that many of the email addresses you will try to pick have already been taken. This is why, next to the "Yahoo ID and Email" field, you have a Check button:

The "email address" is actually composed of your user name (the Yahoo ID) and the domain name (what the form calls "Email").

This is because Yahoo Mail lets you choose between one of three ".com" domains for your email address: yahoo.com, ymail.com, or rocketmail.com. (See below, our Yahoo Mail tip for new accounts, and alternate ways to get the Yahoo user name you want.)

If the Yahoo email address you want is not available, you will see the following message:


And Yahoo Mail will, in most cases, suggest alternate user names, typically the user name you picked with several digits at the end. If possible, we recommend that you avoid using digits in your Yahoo Mail account, since numbers are more difficult to remember for most people (and many of your friends or relatives will forget your email address!)

If the email address you really want is not available, consider signing up for a new email account with a localized version of Yahoo, like Yahoo.co.uk for Great Britain, Yahoo.fr for France, etc. If the user name you covet is not available for "@yahoo.com", that same user name may still be available with "@yahoo.co.uk".

Protect your new Yahoo email address with a strong password

Choosing a password can also be a bit tricky: it needs to be strong enough to protect access to your Yahoo emails, but at the same time easy enough for you to remember. Yahoo will help you by preventing you from picking an easy-to-guess password:


And telling you when you have a good password (mixing lowercase and lowercase letters, symbols, and numbers make even a short password very strong).

Once you have picked a strong password, confirm it by re-typing it in the next field.

Enter valid Yahoo account password-recovery information

The alternate email address you supply is important, as it is the primary method Yahoo will use for password recovery; if you have forgotten your Yahoo password and have not supplied a valid alternate email address, you will still have a chance to recover your password by answering to the secret questions, but we recommend to enter a real alternate email address (in case you forget the answers to your secret questions).

The final step of your new Yahoo Mail account creation is the confirmation that you are a human, and not an automated software creating fake Yahoo email accounts for spam purposes. Type the code shown in the box, and click the Create My Account button.

Unless Yahoo brings you back to the new account signup form to correct some of the information you entered, you will see the following screen, confirming that your new Yahoo email address has been created and is ready to be used:

Click on the Continue button, and you will be redirected to the Yahoo homepage; you can always tell if you are logged in to your Yahoo account by looking under the Search button: Yahoo will greet you by the first name you entered when creating your email address, as shown on the screenshot.

Access your new Yahoo Mail email account

To access your emails, since you are already logged in, just click on the Yahoo! Mail link in the sidebar on the left of the Yahoo homepage. Notice also that a number is displayed between parentheses: this number indicates the number of unread emails you currently have in your Yahoo inbox. In the case of a newly created Yahoo Mail account, this is simply a welcome email from Yahoo!

You are now seeing your new Yahoo email account's inbox:

Final step: make a new Yahoo Mail account known to others

As you will see in one of our next Yahoo Mail tutorials, it is very easy to add a contact to Yahoo Mail. This is probably what you'll want to do next, since having a new email address means that you want to make your new Yahoo email account known to your friends and relatives, so that they can update your contact information in their address book.