Yahoo Mail is Still the Choice for Many – But Why?

Last updated on March 4th, 2024 at 10:45 pm


Yahoo Mail continues to thrive for a multitude of reasons. If you thought it was dead, think again.

Yahoo Logo

Image by Simon Steinberger from Pixabay

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I Thought Yahoo Mail Was Dead

I don’t even remember my old Yahoo! email address. It seems like I abandoned it a lifetime ago… and if you’re a teenager, it probably was. In fact, I think the last time I logged into my Yahoo mail was 15+ years ago.

Like most people, I assumed the rest of the world left it behind just like I did. As it turns out, I was wrong.

Familiarity & Longevity

Yahoo! is older than most entities on the web. It was started in 1994 and quickly became one of the biggest names in Internet. Yahoo mail was made available in 1997 and was one of the first email providers.

Yahoo! rode the dot com bubble and survived the subsequent crash in 2001 when many other competitors simply didn’t make it. In a world where tech companies blink in and out of existence at an astonishing rate, Yahoo! provides a stability rarely found.

Their uncharacteristic longevity generated a lot of loyal users who trust Yahoo! and have simply made it part of their normal web routine over the course of many years.

E-mail @ symbol at the beach
Old habits die hard.

Yahoo Mail is Vendor-Neutral

In the days of email infancy, most people acquired their email address from whoever they got their Internet service from. AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe all provided email to their customers as part of their service.

My very first email was provided by the college I attended, but once I subscribed to America Online, I had an aol.com email address that became my primary email for years… until I changed ISPs. When I became a Comcast customer, suddenly I lost my aol.com email and ended up with a comcast.net address instead. Having to let all my contacts know I had a new email address was a hassle.

The Internet was ripe for the picking for a vendor-neutral email service that you could take with you regardless of your ISP. Yahoo mail was one of the first email providers that wasn’t tied to an ISP. While Gmail is the most popular choice these days, Yahoo mail had such a head start that tons of people still keep their accounts active.

Yahoo.com is Still Popular

While many people moved on to Google as their Internet home page over the last decade – and possibly forgot about Yahoo! altogether, it turns out that Yahoo! is still very popular.

According to Alexa, yahoo.com is the 9th most popular site on the web. Believe it or not, Yahoo! has actually modernized its website over the past 5 years and it’s become a great new landing page for web surfing. Their search engine is an excellent alternative to Google.

Yahoo Home page
Yahoo’s home page is uncluttered and full of information.

With quick and easy access to your Yahoo mail right on the front page of Yahoo! it actually make sense that people still use it – especially those who still like to use yahoo.com as their start page. Keeping true to it’s heritage as an Internet directory, Yahoo! provides a great jumping off point to lots of other places on the web.

Yahoo Mail: Final Thoughts

With high profile security issues and hacks abound, yahoo mail still isn’t my first choice for email service. And they probably never will be. That being said, it’s still used by a lot of people.

The key is that those people don’t necessarily use yahoo mail as their only email account. Many probably also have Gmail accounts or maybe even Hotmail accounts (yes, that’s still around too).

Yahoo mail’s longevity lies in it’s deep roots and a surprisingly well designed website that still gets millions of visitors every day.

FAQs


Sources & Additional Reading:

Wikipedia: Yahoo Mail

Sharif Jameel is a business owner, IT professional, runner, & musician. His professional certifications include CASP, Sec+, Net+, MCSA, & ITIL and others. He’s also the guitar player for the Baltimore-based cover bands, Liquifaction and Minority Report.

8 thoughts on “Yahoo Mail is Still the Choice for Many – But Why?”

  1. Email was used to make contact with friends when away from home.
    now you can not get into your Acct without getting verification text or Email

  2. Pingback: Is Remote Working Everything it's Cracked up to Be? - Website Design Baltimore | SEO Baltimore | CGS Computers

  3. Ricky Bhattacharya

    Years will pass by, and if People share photos and other documents via yahoo mail, they will all be visible in its Views Tabs, namely Photos and Documents. We can forward attachments from the inbox without even reuploading them, check which emaill is associated with a particular attachment, access contacts in the app itself, store large number of emails thanks to its free 1TB storage. Furthermore, thepurpose of categorizing emails in Yahoo is different unlike Gmail. In gmail, the functions are segregated — First, there are five horizontally aligned tabs: Inbox; Promotion; Social; Updates; Forum, Second, The spam, starred, labelled, important, and trash mails are located in the left panel, Third, We have to search the archive mails using the email address of the sender. Whereas in yahoo mail, it’s easy, straight forward because all such purposes are carried out with the help of its vertically aligned tabs — Inbox, Unread, Starred, drafts, sent, archive, spam, and trash.

    1. You make a great point, especially for those who have a long personal history with their Yahoo mail account. I probably would still check mine if I knew the password – but I don’t and I’m pretty sure it’s either gone or been in the hands of hackers long ago. Thanks for taking the time to add your comments!

  4. I’ve had the Yahoo email address for years using it for family. I used my Mail.com address for everything else. The problem is that Yahoo has become so political with their hatred of Trump, they have difficulty covering any other news where Mail.com covers other topics. I will probably go through the hassle of finding another provider and dropping Yahoo.

  5. Mark Nicholson

    Although I am a techie and worked in IT for many years, I have stuck with Yahoo email because, although I have a gmail account, I have always hated their user interface. Google has gotten better but they were never good UI people. The Yahoo email interface has always been more user friendly and intuitive to me. Also, my yahoo address goes back to 1997, the first year Yahoo mail came out. Also, Yahoo email has had their security hacks but have learned from it and is now quite secure.

    1. Hey Mark, thanks for stopping by and taking the time to read my article! I agree with you that Google’s interface is horrible, but I’ve always used my email accounts using imap so I almost never get ‘exposed’ to the bad UI on the website. I had a Yahoo email a long time ago, but I don’t remember the password and my recovery emails for the account are long gone, so I’ll never be able to get back into it again.

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