How To Add Contacts To Yahoo Mail

Your Yahoo address book or contact list is used to store the details (e.g. email address) of people that you regularly send email to.

In this tutorial we look at:

• Manually adding a new contacts.
• Adding a contact from received email message
• Automatically adding contacts when sending messages to new email addresses.
• Importing contacts from another email account
• How to edit, Delete and Restore Yahoo Contacts
• Deleting Contacts
• How to create contact lists for sending to multiple contacts.

To manage your contacts click on the new contacts icon which you will find on the top left.

Adding a Contact Manually To Yahoo Contacts

To manually add a contact click the contacts button

Click the new contacts button

Now edit the contact details.

You should find the contact listed in the contacts list.

How it appears depends on how you sort the address list. Click Actions to change the sort order

Here is the contact listed first,last

Here is the contact listed last,first

Adding a Contact from a Received Message

When you are reading a message from someone you can click the sender name, and a dialogue box will open allowing you to add the sender to your contacts.

If you click add to contacts then you can edit the contact details before saving the new contact.

Automatically Adding a Contact When Sending a Message

You need to go to settings>Writing emails and enable automatically add new recipient to contacts

When you send a message to someone new they will automatically appear in your contacts.

However you may want to manually edit the entry as the recipient name is set to the email address.

 Importing Contacts from another Email Account

You can import directly from Facebook, Gmail and outlook.com.

For other providers you will need to export the contacts to a .csv file and then import them using the import wizard.

See  Importing Yahoo Contacts for the details.

Editing Contact Details

To edit a contact then select the contact and click the edit details link (screen shot below)

You can add telephone numbers, birthdays, web site addresses and more details but the minimum you need is the first name and email address.

Deleting and Restoring Contacts from Yahoo Mail

To delete a contact

• Go to contacts
• Check the contacts you want to delete (see screen shot)
• click the bin (delete) icon.
• Confirm

However you should note that the  contact doesn’t get completely deleted.

If you click on the deleted contacts link directly under the ALL contacts link you will see all of the contacts that are waiting to be permanently deleted.

If you click the check box you will get more more options in the menu.

You will have the option of restoring the contact or permanently deleting it.

Click delete permanently and then confirm to delete it, or restore to add it back to your contacts list.

[outline style=”yellow”]Note: You cannot add a new contact with the same email address if one already exists in the deleted contacts folder.[/outline]

Finding Contacts

If you have lots of contacts you can use the search contacts feature to find the one you want.

Create and Use Yahoo Contact Lists or Distribution Lists

A contact lists or distribution list as they are called in some email systems allow you to easily send email to a group of people.

To create a new list open your contacts, and you should see a very faint link to create a new list in the left column (see screen shot)

Click new list and edit the text with the name of your new list.

When created you can assign contacts to the list by clicking the check boxes next to the contacts, and then click assign to add them to the list.

Here is a good video from Yahoo which shows you how to create the contact list and send email to it.

Video Notes:

Important – You should note the Bcc line is used to keep the list confidential. This is typically what you use when sending a newsletter.

Also sending on the Bcc line means that if the recipient does a reply to all then he doesn’t reply to the entire list.

The list is expanded before being sent, and so it does not enable you to bypass the maximum recipients limit. See list size later

Removing Contacts from Lists

Deleting Contact Lists

You can delete a contact list.

Note: This doesn’t delete the individual contacts

1. Select the Contact List.
2. Click Actions.
3. Click Delete List.(screen shot below)
4. Click Delete in the confirmation prompt.

ALL Contacts List

Some email systems add each contact to a contact list called all contacts or Everyone.

There is no default ALL contacts Lists in Yahoo Mail you will need to create your own.

Contact List Size

Yahoo imposes a limit on the maximum numbers of recipients that you can send an email to.

However they don’t disclose the size limit due to their anti spam policy.

Therefore ,to be cautious create contact lists with no more than 50 members. See- Yahoo support maximum recipients

Exporting Yahoo Contact Lists

Contact Lists aren’t exported with the contacts, as far as I can see, but some formats will show list membership so you can work back from there.

Common Questions and Answers

Q- Where is the Yahoo Contact List Stored?

A- It is stored on the Yahoo Email Server.

Q- How do I get my Yahoo Contacts into Windows Live Mail, Outlook etc.

A- You will need to export the contacts using the yahoo export tools, and the use the import tools on your email client to import them. See Exporting Contacts from Yahoo Mail

Related Tutorials and Resources:

• Importing Contacts into Yahoo
• Sending Email With Yahoo Mail
• Reading Email With Yahoo Mail