How Do I Remove Advertising From Yahoo Email?

In the world of free email accounts, there really is no such thing as a free lunch. Yahoo, like other webmail providers, serves adverts with your mail to make money. You might understand why -- after all, you're getting your email service at no cost -- but this may not make it any less irritating. These adverts can be intrusive and distracting, especially if you click on them by accident. If you just can't ignore them, you can hide, remove or block them. You can also customize the types of ads that appear.

The simplest way to avoid seeing adverts in your Yahoo account is to hide them. To do this, go into your email account or open an email and look for the arrow pointing to the right between your mail and the advert. If you click this arrow, you'll hide the advert. This isn't a permanent fix. Adverts come back every time you interact with an email, and you must click the arrow each time you want to hide an advert.

If you're willing to pay for your Yahoo email account, you can remove advertising permanently. Upgrading to the Ad Free Mail account costs $49.99 per year, at the time of publication. To do this, go to the Settings menu in your email account, select "Ad Free Mail" and then follow the instructions to pay via the Yahoo Wallet. In the past, Yahoo bundled extra features into its paid email service but now offers most of these benefits to all users. Apart from the removal of adverts, the only other feature of Ad Free Mail is that your account will never be set to inactive.

Rather than paying for an ad-free account, you can instead control the type of advertising that Yahoo displays. Yahoo analyzes the way you use its sites and services to predict the kinds of advertising you might be interested in, but if you don't like this kind of tracking, you can use the Ad Interest Manager function to set customized advertising rules based on your interests. You can either opt-out of the interest advertising system completely or block adverts by category.

If you want to get rid of email adverts without paying to upgrade, install a free ad blocking extension or add-on to your browser. Some blockers work mostly on Internet advertising; others focus on Web mail advertising. For example, you can use presets on Adblock Plus and AdBlock to block most advertising, or you can customize filters to block only specific sites. Webmail Ad Blocker blocks only ads in Web mail. The Yahoo Mail Hide Ad Panel add-on focuses on Yahoo mail advertising, hiding adverts and freeing up the space they normally take up on the screen. Depending on your system and your browser, you may need to try different products until you find one that does exactly what you want.