Connecting Yahoo Mail (with an app password)

Yahoo Mail connects to PitchBrand over IMAP using a Yahoo app password. This is a one-off 16-character code you generate from Yahoo's account security page — Yahoo no longer lets third-party apps sign in with your regular password. The whole setup takes about three minutes.

This guide also covers other Yahoo-family addresses: @ymail.com, @rocketmail.com, and country variants like @yahoo.co.uk or @yahoo.ca. They all use the same servers.

Step 1: Generate your Yahoo app password

1. Open login.yahoo.com/account/security and sign in.
2. Under Other ways to sign in (or External connections), select Generate app password.
3. Type a name you'll recognize later — PitchBrand works well.
4. Click Generate password. Yahoo will show a 16-character code, usually grouped as four blocks of four letters.
5. Copy it immediately — Yahoo only shows the password once. If you lose it, you'll need to generate a new one.
6. Click Done.

Tip: Yahoo recommends generating app passwords in a browser you've used to sign into Yahoo for several days in a row, and not in Incognito or Private mode. If the option to generate a password doesn't appear, sign into Yahoo in your normal browser first, wait a few hours, and try again.

Step 2: Connect in PitchBrand

1. In PitchBrand, open Settings > Mailbox and choose Other Email (IMAP).
2. You'll be taken to a secure form. Enter:
   • Email address — your full Yahoo address (e.g. yourname@yahoo.com)
   • Password — the 16-character app password you just generated (paste it without the spaces; spaces are fine too)
   • IMAP server — imap.mail.yahoo.com
   • IMAP port — 993
   • IMAP encryption — SSL/TLS
   • SMTP server — smtp.mail.yahoo.com
   • SMTP port — 465
   • SMTP encryption — SSL/TLS
3. Submit the form. You'll be brought back to PitchBrand and you'll briefly see Finishing setup while your mailbox syncs. Once that's done you'll see a green Connected badge.

Things to know about Yahoo app passwords

• The app password is independent of your real password. If you change your Yahoo password later, the app password keeps working. To revoke PitchBrand's access, go back to the Yahoo security page and delete the password you named "PitchBrand."
• 2-step verification is recommended but not strictly required on Yahoo to generate an app password.
• You can have many app passwords. Use a unique one per app so you can revoke just PitchBrand's if you ever need to.

If the connection fails

• "Invalid credentials" or Connection Error — re-check the app password. Most failures here are a typo or a stale password. Generate a fresh one and try again.
• Yahoo blocked the sign-in — Yahoo occasionally flags new IMAP connections as suspicious. Open login.yahoo.com/account/activity, find the recent sign-in, and confirm it was you.
• "App password" option missing on Yahoo — sign into Yahoo in your normal browser first and wait a few hours, then retry. New or rarely-used browsers often won't show the option.

Tip: If you reset your Yahoo password later for unrelated reasons, your PitchBrand connection will keep working. But if you're changing your Yahoo password because you think the account was compromised, also delete and regenerate the PitchBrand app password — old app passwords stay active until you delete them manually.