How to Back Up Yahoo Mail to Your Computer

Yahoo Mail has changed ownership and infrastructure several times over the years, and its account security options have shifted along with it. A lot of older backup tutorials tell you to generate an "app password" for Yahoo and use it to connect a mail client over IMAP. That advice is now out of date — Yahoo Mail does not support app-specific passwords the way Gmail or iCloud do. If a tool is asking you to generate one for Yahoo specifically, it's following an outdated flow that won't work for most accounts today.

What actually works for Yahoo Mail

Yahoo still fully supports IMAP access for third-party mail clients — you just connect through Yahoo's standard sign-in flow instead of an app password. In practice, that means:

• IMAP server: imap.mail.yahoo.com, port 993, SSL/TLS.
• SMTP server (if you're also sending): smtp.mail.yahoo.com, port 465 or 587, SSL/TLS.
• Sign-in: use your regular Yahoo account credentials through the client's normal connection flow. Depending on your account's security settings, Yahoo may prompt you to approve the new device or client the first time.

If your mail client specifically insists on an app password and Yahoo's account settings no longer offer a way to generate one, that client's Yahoo support may simply be broken or outdated — it's not something wrong with your account.

Why back up Yahoo Mail at all

Yahoo gives free accounts a generous 1 TB of storage, so running out of space is rarely the reason people back up Yahoo Mail. The more common reasons are:

• Yahoo has been sold and restructured multiple times, and product changes or account security incidents have made long-time users understandably cautious about relying on it as the only copy of their email history.
• Migrating away from Yahoo to a different provider, and wanting a local copy before making the switch.
• Simply wanting an offline, searchable archive that doesn't depend on any provider staying online or keeping your account active.

Backing up Yahoo Mail with MailVault

MailVault is a free, open-source desktop email app for macOS and Linux that connects to Yahoo Mail through its standard IMAP connection flow — no app password required, no workaround needed. Add your Yahoo account, sign in normally, and MailVault downloads your mail as individual .eml files stored in a standard Maildir structure on your disk. Each email is its own file, so you can browse, search, and open your archive directly, or point another mail client at the same files later if you ever want to.

Manual archiving of your full Yahoo mailbox is free and unlimited in MailVault. If you want your Yahoo backup to update itself automatically on a schedule rather than archiving in batches, that's part of MailVault Premium ($4/month or $25/year; 14-day free trial on yearly).

Frequently Asked Questions

Related reading: what to look for in an IMAP backup tool, how local IMAP archiving works, and backing up email before closing an account.