Standard folders and custom email folders in Yahoo Mail

When you first sign up to create a Yahoo email account, five folders will automatically be added for email functionality: these are the Yahoo Mail inbox, Drafts folder, Sent folder, Spam folder, and Trash folder; this tutorial will give you a brief overview of the purpose of each of these standard folders. But, like Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo Mail also allows you to create custom email folders to organize your messages the way you want to.

The five Yahoo Mail standard folders

Here is a description of the purpose and traits of each of the folder that are part of any Yahoo email account. These standard email folders cannot be deleted nor  renamed.

• The Yahoo Mail Inbox is the most important Yahoo email folder that is part of all Yahoo Mail accounts: without it, you could not receive email messages! As its name implies, the Inbox is where all emails sent to your email address are delivered. By default, emails are sorted by date, with newest messages displayed at the top, and oldest at the bottom. All emails go there, with one exception:
• The Yahoo Mail Spam folder is like a secondary inbox, designed to fight spam by keeping suspicious messages outside your main inbox. Yahoo does a good job at preventing obvious junk mail from reaching your email account in the first place, but it doesn't want to delete messages that might be legitimate. This is why you have a Spam folder, through whose content you should regularly go to ensure that no valid emails stay there, since they will automatically be deleted.
• The Yahoo Mail Drafts folder is a very useful temporary folder where you can store email messages you have started composing, but have not yet had the time to finish and send to their recipient(s). Just go back to the Drafts folder at any time, from any internet-connected computer, and finish writing that email - and send it!
• Another standard email folder is the Yahoo Mail Sent folder: as you probably guessed from its name, this is where Yahoo stores (by default, since this setting can be turned off) a copy of every message you sent from that email account. In case you don't remember if you sent an email, replied to one, or forwarded it to someone, just go pay a visit to the Sent folder, which is also sorted by date.
• Finally, you have the Yahoo Mail Trash folder: whenever you delete an email message from your inbox (or any other email folder outside the Spam folder), that deleted email will not be permanently deleted right away - instead, it will go inside the Trash folder, which is automatically purged by Yahoo Mail regularly. This affords you a second chance to restore a message accidentally deleted!

Custom email folders in Yahoo Mail

The world would be a messy place if Yahoo Mail didn't allow you to organize the mass of email messages that land in your inbox. Fortunately, you can create custom email folders to store messages by category, sender, topic, etc. The nice thing about these custom email folders is that you set the tone, and customize your webmail experience to fit your organizational skills and tastes; learn how to create a folder in Yahoo Mail.

Unlike the five standard folders, here are things you can do with custom email folders: rename an email folder or delete an email folder. Yet another Yahoo Mail tutorial will explain how to empty an email folder, which can be done for all folders, one way or the other!