Years ago I made the switch from Yahoo Mail to Gmail and it appears I’m not alone. According to a 2019 article written by CNBC, “it (Gmail) stands as the most dominant online email service with more than 1.5 billion global active users. One of the reasons I made the switch is because Gmail “just works”. That’s more than I can say about Yahoo which feels slow, buggy and outdated.
But just because I’ve made the switch doesn’t mean all of my clients have. In fact I recently had a client call me up because they could no longer access their mail from Microsoft Outlook.
So what do you do when Yahoo Mail IMAP no longer works with Microsoft Outlook? Below are the steps I took to fix the issue and hopefully it helps others as well.
Customer Support
Some of you might be asking “Why not just contact support? Clearly they can help solve the issue.” This sounds good in theory but it’s not so simple. It turns out that Yahoo Mail now charges customers for support. Now I’m not here to say Yahoo shouldn’t make money. But if their products are buggy and not working properly why should I or my customer have to PAY to fix THEIR problems?
Yahoo calls their service “Yahoo Plus Support”. It’s $5 a month which isn’t a lot of money. But this isn’t about money, it’s about principle. It blows my mind that Yahoo would do this to the remaining loyal customers they have. I’ll pass on the “Support”. Thanks anyway Yahoo…
Server Settings
The first thing you should do is make sure your IMAP server settings are correct. In Outlook you can do this by clicking on File – Account Settings – Server Settings. Make sure both Incoming Mail and Outgoing mail are the same as what’s below:
Incoming Mail (IMAP) Server:
- Server – imap.mail.yahoo.com
- Port – 993
- Requires SSL – Yes
Outgoing Mail (SMTP) Server:
- Server – smtp.mail.yahoo.com
- Port – 465 or 587
- Requires SSL – Yes
- Requires authentication – Yes
Your login info:
- Email address – Your full email address (name@domain.com)
- Password – Your account’s password
- Requires authentication – Yes
Generate App Password
If your server settings look correct it’s time for Plan B. Go to your Yahoo Account Settings by Clicking Here. Then go Account Security and scroll down to where it says Generate app password.
Once you click on that it will ask you to select your app. Choose the device you are having problems with. In this example I choose “Outlook Desktop” and click Generate.
A password will appear that you will need to copy and paste. Yahoo even provides you with the steps to enter in this password.
- Go to “Tools” on your Outlook client
- Click “Account Settings”
- Choose your Yahoo account and click “Change”
- Copy the app password above and paste it into the password field
This ended up solving the issue my client had and everything worked properly again. I’m unsure why this needs to be done for IMAP to work correctly and when speaking with someone from Yahoo on Twitter they didn’t seem to know either.
Photo Credit: Yahoo