The Yahoo! Survival Guide

So by now you have probably read about how Yahoo! is facing some hard times with layoffs and some services being eliminated. As a Yahoo user, you may be quite concerned about everything from your email to photos to discussion groups being effected. Well not to worry, by the end of this blog, you will know how to setup some alternative services and backing up what is important to you. So let’s get started then.

Yahoo Mail

Obviously the biggest concern for many Yahoo users, is their email account. Now, I want to say I don’t think anything will happen to your Yahoo email. If Yahoo were to ever go out of business in the extreme case, they would most likely find a buyer for their email service and allow you to maintain your email account. But say you want to be cautious and think it may be time to have an alternative email address and if you don’t have an alternative email address then you really should.

Yahoo Mail to Gmail

I’m going to speak about Google’s Gmail service for this setup. They are well established, have great integration, and even have built in messaging as part of Gmail. So, what is the first step to get there? First, you need to setup a Gmail account and this is very easy, just go to Gmail.com and click on “Create an Account”



From there, you will be prompted to enter in standard information to get your Gmail account going. Once you are logged in, go to Settings in the upper right hand corner and click on that.



After doing so, you will see a list of options, one of them is called, “Accounts and Import” click on that.


Next, you will see “Import Mail and Contacts” click on that.




At this point you will enter in the information for your Yahoo email account.




Now it will ask just what you would like to import over to Gmail from Yahoo Mail. Select what you want, and click on “Start import”



At this point it will give you a confirmation message that your email and contacts are being imported over to Gmail. Although it says it could take 2 days, it is often done in minutes.



After a few minutes, your Gmail inbox will show the email in your Yahoo inbox and any folders you setup in Yahoo Mail will be converted to Labels which is Gmail’s term for folders.

So that is how you can convert your Yahoo Mail over to Gmail. In my next edition of The Yahoo Survival Guide, I will show you how to backup your Flickr photo albums. As always, please let me know if this was helpful for you. Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!