Yahoo Mail
Ranked 17 of 17 email services by recommenders
Free web email with a long history, called more reliable than Proton by some; critics report lost mail, spam filtering trouble and a poor browser experience with ads.
Free web email with a long history, called more reliable than Proton by some; critics report lost mail, spam filtering trouble and a poor browser experience with ads.
20 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 5
- criticize it
- 15
- approval share
- 25%
Recommended in 5 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Owned for 29 years
Median of the 3 owners who said how long they have had it.
Each square is one year.
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 5 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 0.3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 5 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
More reliable record than Proton
“something like Proton, Yahoo, or Gmail is probably better”
Comment from 10 Oct 2026 in “Ask HN: MS Outlook login without an extra email address” “At least Yahoo has way better record than Proton.”
Comment from 6 Mar 2026 in “Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous 'Stop Cop City' Protester”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Lost old mail and emails
“They had a catastrophe and lost some people's mail. I never got such an email, but one time I looked, and it lost all of my emails before 2000.”
Comment from 17 Jun 2026 in “Want your images back? Sure... That'll be $5!” “they've silently lost all my mail from 1990s”
Comment from 25 Mar 2026 in “Apple Just Lost Me” “i too lost all my yahoo emails. sad.”
Comment from 27 Jun 2026 in “Ask HN: Yahoo deleted all my emails. Now what?” Spam filtering blocks legitimate mail
“even a single "mark as spam" report by any of their email users would blackhole the entire email for ALL of their users”
Comment from 2 Nov 2025 in “Stop 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header (2024)” “their spam filtering has gone to absolute shit”
Comment from 7 Oct 2026 in “OpenTPU – An open-source AI accelerator, developed by AI” Poor browser experience and login issues
“the few times I've had to use yahoo mail from a browser without an ad blocker, it was an unbelievably bad experience”
Comment from 19 Feb 2026 in “Micropayments as a reality check for news sites” “Web browser visiting Yahoo Mail is poorly comparing your external IPv6 with your home's IPv4 and rejecting your login.”
Comment from 26 Jan 2026 in “IPv6 is not insecure because it lacks a NAT”
Other email services people recommend
The four most recommended other email services, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fastmail | 388 | 95 | 80% | 13 | 5 yrs90 owners | Approved |
| Gmail | 295 | 797 | 27% | 12 | 20 yrs58 owners | — |
| Proton Mail | 196 | 222 | 47% | 13 | 3 yrs29 owners | — |
| Tuta Mail | 49 | 17 | 74% | 13 | — | Approved |
| Yahoo MailThis page | 5 | 15 | 25% | 5 | 29 yrs3 owners | — |
What people said
19 of the 20 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“something like Proton, Yahoo, or Gmail is probably better”
“their spam filtering has gone to absolute shit”
“Remember in the early days you'd log into Yahoo or whatever and the first thing you'd see was your inbox”
“Most free alternatives like Yahoo would lock forwarding behind a paywall.”
“one month where Yahoo spammed me”
“i too lost all my yahoo emails. sad.”
“A year of inactivity before total deletion is way too short for email, imo.”
“They had a catastrophe and lost some people's mail. I never got such an email, but one time I looked, and it lost all of my emails before 2000.”
“Photobucket was way nicer than Yahoo from this point of view”
“all the products that come out of it are absolutely garbage”
“email providers like Yahoo's security are a joke”
“they've silently lost all my mail from 1990s”
“At least Yahoo has way better record than Proton.”
“It's not just Outlook, it's all MS email products as well as Yahoo.”
“the few times I've had to use yahoo mail from a browser without an ad blocker, it was an unbelievably bad experience”
“Yahoo! wouldn't let me simply change my birthdate as often as I wanted to”
“Web browser visiting Yahoo Mail is poorly comparing your external IPv6 with your home's IPv4 and rejecting your login.”
“Yahoo is the worst offender and seems to do so at some base despite my best efforts”
“even a single "mark as spam" report by any of their email users would blackhole the entire email for ALL of their users”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.