Email apps on phones notify you when new mail arrives, but Yahoo Mail goes further and allows notifications to be configured differently for each email account. Customize notifications.
Every email app on your iPhone or Android phone shows notifications, but if you have multiple email accounts, like work, home, personal, sales, support, a honeypot for web signups, or whatever, the Yahoo Mail app enables you to choose what types of emails in each account show a notification.
This feature sets Yahoo Mail apart from other email apps, most of which show notifications from all email accounts or all categories of message.
Stop getting pestered or distracted by your phone with unwanted or unnecessary notifications about emails you are not interested in. Only get a notification when there is something important to see in your email inbox.
For this guide I customize notifications in the Yahoo Mail Android app, but you should find the Yahoo Mail iPhone app works just the same. It is aimed at people with multiple email accounts in their mail app although some features are useful to people with only one email account. I use a free Yahoo Mail account, this is not a paid feature and everyone can use it
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1: Open the menu
Open the Yahoo Mail app on your phone and press the button in the top left corner of the screen to open the menu sidebar.
2: Open Settings
The menu opens on the left side and your email accounts are listed at the top. About half way down the menu is Settings. Press it to open them.
3: Go to notifications
Swipe to see all the settings and press Notifications. This is where we can customize what email notifications we see on the phone. It will enable us to hide those that we don’t want to see.
4: Show all notifications in Yahoo Mail
The default settings for the Yahoo Mail app is for Customize for each account to be turned off and to enable notifications for All messages and features. You are notified when every email arrives in every account.
You could customize notifications for all accounts here, and select Just the message categories I choose, or None, but let’s customize each email account separately. Turn on the switch next to Customize for each account.
5: Customize notifications per account
Turn on the switch, Customize for each account, and all your email accounts appear below the option. Press each account in turn and you can set notifications differently for each one. Some can show all notifications, some can show some notifications and some can show none.
This is an excellent feature that few other email apps on phones have. Use it!
6: Customize notifications for a single email
This screen appears no matter which email account you select. However, the settings apply only to this account. The best option to select is Just the message categories I choose. Then use the switches below to choose which categories of email you want to see notifications for.
Do not press the Apply to all accounts button at the bottom, because it does exactly what it says. The whole point of this custom setup is to have different settings for different accounts. Just select the options you want and then tap the back arrow button in the top left corner of the screen.
How does the Yahoo Mail app know which category an email belongs to, and therefore whether to allow or block notifications?
No doubt it uses a few rules and a bit of AI to work this out. Some emails are obviously about travel, package delivery tracking, promotions from shops and so on. The Yahoo Mail app will not be perfect and there may be occasional emails that are wrongly categorized, and the app ends up either showing or hiding notifications when it shouldn’t. All you can expect is that it categorizes most messages correctly. Do check for new emails when you have the time, just in case.
7: Repeat for all accounts
Repeat this for all email accounts. For this one, I selected None so no notifications show on the phone. Press the Back arrow, not Apply to all accounts.
