Yes, people still use Yahoo Mail. According to one report from late 2019, there are more than 200 million active Yahoo email users responsible for more than 26 billion emails every day, all by themselves. But why would someone choose Yahoo Mail over Gmail?

Perhaps that’s a biased question. After all, there are more than 200 million people who find Yahoo email perfectly usable, and we’re a bunch of bona fide Gmail fanboys and fangirls.

So what are the differences between Gmail vs Yahoo Mail, and should these differences affect which one you use?

Who Owns Yahoo Now?

Yahoo is privately owned by funds managed by affiliates of Apollo Global Management, and Verizon kept a 10% minority stake. The company’s legal name is Yahoo Inc.

The path there took two sales. Verizon completed a 4.48 billion usd purchase of Yahoo’s operating business in June 2017. Verizon folded it into a unit called Oath, later renamed Verizon Media.

Apollo announced a 5 billion usd acquisition of Verizon Media in May 2021. Apollo’s own press release confirmed the deal closed on September 1, 2021. The company went back to being called Yahoo.

Wait, so is Yahoo still a real company? Yes. It’s just a private one now, which is why its Mail numbers stopped appearing in public filings.

What Is Ymail, and Can You Still Get One?

Ymail is a Yahoo email domain from the late 2000s, and existing @ymail.com addresses still work for signing in. Yahoo no longer offers ymail.com to new signups.

Yahoo’s own help documentation treats ymail and rocketmail as legacy addresses rather than current products.

Yahoo’s sign-in guidance reads: “If your account uses a non-Yahoo, ymail, or rocketmail email address, enter the full email address when signing in.”

So an @ymail.com address is a Yahoo Mail account. There’s no separate ymail service, no separate features, and no difference in storage or price.

Do People Still Use Yahoo Mail?

Yes, though nobody outside Yahoo knows how many. Yahoo publishes no Mail-specific user count, and it stopped filing the disclosures that once carried one.

The nearest published figure is company-wide rather than Mail-specific. Both the Verizon and Apollo announcements of the 2021 sale gave the same number. Each described Yahoo as having close to 900 million monthly active users.

Google’s last self-published Gmail milestone is older than people assume. Google announced 1.5 billion Gmail users in April 2019 for Gmail’s fifteenth birthday and has published no newer Gmail-specific count since.

Here’s my honest read on the comparison numbers. Treat any precise “Gmail has X users, Yahoo has Y users” table as an estimate, because neither company currently publishes the second figure.

Gmail vs Yahoo Mail at a Glance

What you’re comparing Gmail Yahoo Mail
Free storage Google says up to 15 GB, shared across Drive, Gmail and Photos Yahoo says 20 GB, and Yahoo Mail storage is not shared with other services
Email content used for ad targeting Google states it does not scan or read Gmail messages to show ads Yahoo’s privacy policy states it analyzes email content to build advertising interest profiles
Inactive account deletion Google says an account is inactive after 2 years and may be deleted Yahoo says a mailbox is inactive after 12 months and its contents are permanently deleted
Published sending limits Google publishes 500 per day for consumer accounts and 2,000 for Workspace Yahoo states it does not disclose sending limits, to enforce anti-spam policies
Attachment size Google publishes a 25 MB limit Yahoo says attachments “must not exceed 25MB in total file size”
Paid upgrade Google sells extra storage through Google One Yahoo sells Mail Plus with 200 GB and an ad-free inbox, plus 100 GB and 1 TB storage add-ons
Disposable addresses Google publishes no equivalent feature Yahoo documents temporary email addresses, with up to 500 on Mail Plus
Message expiry and recall Google documents confidential mode with expiry dates and passcodes Yahoo publishes no equivalent feature

Gmail vs Yahoo Mail: The Basics

Let’s start with some of the basics, and look at what Gmail and Yahoo have in common. Both Gmail and Yahoo Mail have the similar foundational structure you’ve come to expect from nearly all email providers, including things like:

  • Send, receive, and basic inbox functions. Gmail and Yahoo Mail fundamentally “work” the same way. Each service routes your message from server to server using the same protocols, for free, to get your message to a recipient. It doesn’t matter what kind of mail service your recipient is using. Also, all the core inbox functions you’ll immediately expect are present in both platforms, including the ability to mark as read/unread, delete messages, mark as spam, and so on. There aren’t many differences here.
  • Message drafting functions. For the most part, drafting a message looks the same in both platforms. You’ll have access to the same formatting tools (including changing fonts, using bullet points, and including attachments). There are just a few minor differences, such as the placement of different functions and the accessibility of things like Google Drive.
  • A desktop and mobile app. Both Gmail and Yahoo Mail offer a standard desktop version (with many layouts to choose from) and a mobile app to keep things simple on your mobile device.
  • Contact management. And of course, both email platforms give you the tools necessary to keep track of people in your network. You can add new contacts, modify contacts, and get automatic prompts to complete familiar email addresses when you begin to enter them.

If all you’re concerned about is a bare-bones platform to send and receive messages, Gmail and Yahoo Mail are similar for basic messaging, but Gmail stands out with its Image Preview Feature. This allows users to see images directly in emails, offering a more efficient experience and setting Gmail apart from Yahoo Mail in convenience and innovation.

Gmail vs Yahoo Mail: Appearance and Usability

Appearance and usability are somewhat subjective variables, but let’s take a look at them anyway.

In Gmail, by default, you’ll have your emails sorted into three main categories, laid out across the top of your inbox. The majority of the screen is occupied by individual lines, each representing a different email thread.

On the left are simple icons giving you access to functions like Inbox, Drafts, and Sent; you can hover over them to expand their descriptions. In the upper left is a button to Compose, and in the upper right, you’ll find Settings and more options for apps. If you’ve never used Gmail before, it’s easy to get started, and it performs very quickly.

Yahoo may have a similar appearance, depending on how you set it up. The screen is slightly more cluttered, with more space dedicated to functions (like Inbox, etc.) and advertising. Still, you can find nearly all the same features in all the same places. From a subjective standpoint, Yahoo seems to run slightly slower than Gmail, likely due to the demands of more robust advertising.

Both Gmail and Yahoo Mail offer lots of options for how to customize your layout. You can align your messages differently, change the spacing of your inbox, and even use different colors and levels of brightness to make your screen more visible.

The mobile apps are also designed somewhat similarly. Each app offers emails from your inbox and other folders in an easily digestible, easy-to-finger-tap format. Again, you’ll have a number of customization options to tweak the appearance to your liking.

Overall, Gmail seems to be cleaner and more efficient from an aesthetic point of view (in line with Google’s brand standards), but both platforms are fairly accessible and easy to understand.

Winner: Gmail

Gmail vs Yahoo Mail: Organization

Let’s talk about organization.

By default, both platforms have a lot in common. You can mark messages as important, or mark them with a star to distinguish them further. You can sort your inbox and search for messages. You can mark messages as spam, delete them, or archive them. You can even mark messages as read or unread. But from there, the platforms diverge.

For starters, each platform has a different system for managing different types of emails high-level. In Gmail, you’ll have access to different default categories, like Social, Promotions, and Forums; these categories will serve as separate, mini-inboxes to keep track of notifications and alerts that don’t belong in your main inbox.

You can change which of these categories appear and how they work in the Settings menu. Yahoo Mail has something similar, a number of “Views,” including Photos, Documents, Deals, Receipts, Groceries, and Travel. Yahoo will automatically detect which messages belong in these categories, and display them all at once. Both functions are similar, but may be more or less useful depending on how you wish to use them.

By default, Yahoo Mail functions with the folder system you might recognize from Outlook. Each folder contains individual emails as a kind of separate inbox, allowing you to stay organized. In Gmail, the system is slightly different, relying on Labels; the key advantage with Labels is that you can assign many different labels to a single email, rather than exclusively sending it to a single folder.

Each platform also allows you to search your inbox and/or set up automatic filters for incoming emails. However, the filters in Gmail are much more robust; for example, in Yahoo, you’re limited to only filtering messages by sending them to a specific folder. In Gmail, you’ll be able to take more complex actions, like automatically marking them.

Winner: Gmail

Gmail vs Yahoo Mail: Access to Other Apps and Functions

Google and Yahoo aren’t just mail providers; they each offer a suite of other apps and functions for their users, and many of these apps and functions are available within each respective email platform. Accordingly, you can think of each email platform as a kind of gateway or hub that leads to these other areas. Depending on which set of apps and bonus features you prefer, you may lean toward one or the other.

For example, in Yahoo Mail, you can quickly access a calendar, a notepad, and a number of other Yahoo apps like News, Finance, Sports, Fantasy, Politics, and Celebrity news. If you care about these things, or if you like how Yahoo presents and organizes them, Yahoo Mail can be a convenient home base for your online interactions.

The same can be said of Gmail, but it has access to a much wider range of tools. You’ll have access to a calendar and note-taking app, but also a task management app (Tasks), and other Google tools like Drive, News, YouTube, Maps, Translate, and Photos. Additionally, Google has some bonus features in Gmail that aren’t present in Yahoo Mail, including the ability to “snooze” incoming messages for later, and experimental features you can toggle on or off in the Settings menu.

Unless you have a strong preference for Yahoo’s built-in news apps, Gmail is the clear winner here.

Winner: Gmail

Gmail vs Yahoo Mail: Addons and Extensions

We can also think about the add ons and extensions available for each email platform, which have the ability to modify or enhance your experience in different ways.

For example, in Gmail, you’ll have access to the G Suite Marketplace, an open platform where you can search for G Suite apps and third-party extensions that can improve your experience in one way or another. Many of these apps are free, and some are paid, but all of them can alter your Gmail experience. For example, you might integrate with a project management platform to automatically turn your emails into tasks, or you might use a data analytics app to visualize your Gmail activity and improve your email efficiency.

One of the greatest perks of working with Google apps is Google’s universal openness to other developers. They’re easy to get along with, and they make it as easy as possible to build compatible tools and integrations. Accordingly, by using Gmail, you’ll be giving yourself the widest possible range of services to choose from.

Yahoo doesn’t provide the same level of flexibility. There’s no built-in marketplace to explore, and there aren’t many Yahoo-specific addons or extensions you can use to modify your experience. Instead, if you want a different Yahoo Mail experience, you’ll need to rely on browser extensions.

Winner: Gmail

Gmail vs Yahoo Mail: Security and Reliability

Whether you’re emailing in a personal or professional context, you should be thinking about your email security. Can you be sure your email account is uncompromised with either platform?

Obviously, there’s no such thing as perfect security, but Google and Yahoo have different reputations when it comes to protecting consumer data. Notably, there have been several Yahoo data breaches over the past decade.

The first and most significant breach was back in 2013, when an unauthorized third party gained access to more than 3 billion accounts. Apparently not learning its lesson, Yahoo suffered another breach in 2014, getting data from more than 500 million accounts, including account names, email addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates, hashed passwords, and some security questions and answers. And in 2016, account names and passwords for 200 million Yahoo accounts were found for sale on the darknet market site “TheRealDeal.”

Hypothetically, Yahoo has learned from the fallout and negative press associated with these security breaches, but its reputation may never fully recover. Google, by contrast, has had relatively few security scandals; there was a 2018 data breach related to the Google+ API, but this had little to do with Gmail.

Gmail also has a handful of bonus security features you can use to improve the security of your messages. For example, when composing a new message, you can click on the lock-and-clock icon at the bottom of the draft window to activate “confidential mode.”

Here, you can set an expiration date for your message, so it can’t be accessed beyond that date and time. You can also require a SMS-based passcode to access your message, a kind of two-factor authentication to prove your message is only reaching your intended recipient.

Winner: Gmail

Only One of These Two Analyzes Your Email to Target Ads

Yahoo’s privacy policy says it analyzes email content for advertising. Google’s Gmail help page says it does not. Both statements are current, and both are published by the company they describe.

Yahoo’s policy, last updated March 2026, is specific about what gets analyzed.

Yahoo states that it may “Analyze your content and other information (including email content, posts [photos, attachments, and other communications]).” It adds that analysis “to create advertising interest profiles” relies on “emails from retailers and other organizations (these are not personal emails between individuals)” and is subject to opt-out controls.

Google’s wording on its Gmail ads page runs the other way, and it is equally direct.

Google states: “We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.” Google adds that it does “not share your personal information with advertisers, unless you have asked us to.”

This is the single biggest difference between the two services in 2026. Most comparison articles get it wrong in one direction or the other. Read both policies yourself if the answer matters to you.

Yahoo Deletes Inactive Mailboxes After 12 Months. Google Waits 2 Years.

Remember the storage unit. Yahoo empties yours after a year of not visiting, and Google gives you two.

Yahoo’s policy is blunt about what disappears.

Yahoo states: “After 12 months or more of not using your mailbox, it is considered inactive… all mailbox contents, folders, contacts and settings are permanently deleted.” Yahoo exempts Mail Plus subscribers from this deletion.

Google’s threshold is two years and its documentation is more detailed, listing qualifying activities and exceptions such as active subscriptions and Family Link accounts. Google reserves the right to delete an account inactive across Google for at least two years.

If you keep a Yahoo address purely as a password-recovery mailbox, that 12-month clock is the thing to know. One sign-in a year keeps it alive.

What Yahoo’s Data Breaches Cost

The two Yahoo breaches are old news, and the primary documents are worth quoting because the numbers get inflated and deflated constantly.

The US Department of Justice indicted two FSB officers and two criminal hackers in March 2017 over the 2014 breach. The indictment describes “the theft of subscriber information from at least 500 million accounts.”

The 2013 breach was initially reported at 1 billion accounts, and Yahoo later stated it affected all 3 billion accounts then in existence. The 3 billion revision is widely reported, and I could not confirm it against Yahoo’s own filing text.

The regulatory consequence is documented precisely. The SEC charged Altaba, formerly Yahoo, in April 2018 over the failure to disclose the 2014 breach for two years. The penalty was 35 million usd.

Ouch. For what it’s worth, Yahoo’s current security options include 2-step verification by authenticator app and hardware security key, per Yahoo’s own help pages.

Two Numbers This Article Used to Repeat

Earlier versions of this comparison cited 200 million active Yahoo email users, sourced to a 2019 news article rather than to Yahoo. Yahoo has published no Mail-specific user count, so that figure cannot be verified against the company.

The other one is on the Gmail side. The widely repeated “1.8 billion Gmail users” figure traces to third-party estimate sites rather than to any Google statement. Google’s own last published number is 1.5 billion, from April 2019.

Naming both is more useful than deleting them without a word, because they will keep appearing in other comparisons.

Which One Should You Choose?

Choose Gmail if you want your mail kept out of advertising analysis. It also wins if you live in Google Docs, Drive and Calendar, or need confidential mode.

Choose Yahoo Mail if you want more free storage than Google gives. Disposable addresses and an address people already know are the other two reasons.

Keep both if one is your real inbox and the other absorbs retail signups. Just sign into the Yahoo one once a year.

Whichever you pick, the mailbox itself won’t tell you how fast your team answers anyone. EmailAnalytics reads message metadata to answer that, and never copies the contents of anybody’s mail.

Frequently Asked Questions About Gmail vs Yahoo Mail

Is Gmail more secure than Yahoo Mail?

Both offer 2-step verification, authenticator apps and hardware security keys, so the account-level protections are comparable. The clearest published difference is privacy rather than security. Yahoo’s policy allows email content analysis for ad targeting, and Google states it does not scan Gmail for ads.

Who owns Yahoo Mail?

Yahoo is owned by funds managed by affiliates of Apollo Global Management, with Verizon retaining a 10% stake. Apollo’s acquisition of Verizon Media closed on September 1, 2021 and the business was renamed Yahoo.

What is the difference between ymail and Yahoo Mail?

There is no functional difference, because @ymail.com is a legacy Yahoo email domain served by the same Yahoo Mail service. Yahoo no longer offers ymail.com addresses to new users, though existing ones still sign in normally.

How much free storage does Yahoo Mail give you?

Yahoo says Yahoo Mail includes 20 GB of free storage with every account. Google gives up to 15 GB, but that allowance is shared across Gmail, Drive and Photos rather than reserved for mail.

Does Yahoo delete old email accounts?

Yes. Yahoo states that after 12 months of not using a mailbox it is considered inactive. All contents, folders, contacts and settings are then permanently deleted, and Mail Plus subscribers are exempt.

How many emails can you send from Yahoo Mail per day?

Yahoo does not publish a number. Yahoo’s stated reason is anti-spam enforcement. Its help page says Yahoo “does not disclose the number of recipients or emails that can be sent at one time.”

Do people still use Yahoo Mail in 2026?

Yes, though no current Mail-specific user count exists publicly. The closest published figure is the roughly 900 million monthly active users across all Yahoo properties cited when Apollo acquired the company in 2021.

What We Checked, and When

Every Yahoo and Google statement quoted here was checked against each company’s own help documentation, privacy policy or government filings on August 13, 2026. Yahoo help pages publish no last-updated date, so none is implied for them.

One figure is marked unverified on purpose. The claim that the 2013 breach affected all 3 billion Yahoo accounts is widely reported. It was not confirmed against Yahoo’s own filing text, so treat it as reported rather than disclosed.

Gmail or Yahoo Mail: The Short Answer

So, in the question of Gmail vs Yahoo Mail, Gmail is the clearly superior email platform.

Yahoo Mail certainly isn’t bad, it has most of the same features that Gmail has, and a few unique perks like useful custom views for certain types of messages and access to Yahoo’s news services. However, it can’t compete with the number of advantages Gmail has.

Gmail is perceptively faster, it has a cleaner layout, it’s generally considered more secure, it has more options for filters and organization, and its open nature means you’ll be able to modify your experience with literally hundreds of different addons and extensions.

If you’re a current Yahoo Mail user, you may consider switching to Gmail; the process is relatively easy, and can be followed step-by-step in the Settings menu, under the Accounts and Import tab. And if you’re starting an account from scratch, lean toward starting your journey with Gmail. Or, check out this guide to Yahoo business email.

Be sure to check out our other posts comparing Gmail with popular email providers!

Are you currently using Gmail, or are you thinking about switching? One of the biggest advantages of Gmail is the number of tools available to improve your working relationship with email, including EmailAnalytics.

With EmailAnalytics, you can quickly delve into metrics like your average response time, your busiest times and days of the week, and even your average email thread length. Sign up for a free trial today, and learn more about your email habits, including how to improve them!