Yahoo Mail. I've had a Yahoo account for an incredibly long time. In fact, I remember the very early days with Yahoo when it was actually a site that offered a collection of bookmarks. And Yahoo actually started as a collection of Jerry Yang's Sumo Wrestling web site bookmarks. Seems like that should be part of the logo, doesn't it? :-)

You're right to want to move towards having folders help you organize your email too, whether you're using Yahoo Mail, Gmail or any other email service. I have two different email systems I use and each has over 50 folders for projects by client, different sites I'm involved with, specific mailing list archives, and even folders to let me organize discussion by family member. Very helpful and it's how I only have 5-10 messages in my inbox at any given time. (read "retain my sanity").

Yahoo Mail does indeed have a folder capability and it's pretty nicely integrated into the system with the latest facelift that Yahoo's given the service. Let's have a look!

Open up Yahoo Mail and on the top left, you'll see something very similar to this:

Look closely on the left column and you'll see "FOLDERS" listed. We'll come back to that. For now, just open up a specific message and look at the options along the top:

To move a message (or if you've checked the boxes adjacent to a bunch of messages in the previous mailbox view, a bunch of messages) to a specific folder, click on "Move".

But what if I don't have any folders set up yet?

Patience, young Padewan. Look at the next screen snippet:

As highlighted, the "Move" menu shows you all the folders you've already created -- mine are "Archive", "Clients", "Family" and "Play" -- two system folders -- "Spam" and "Trash" -- and the key entry, "New Folder".

Choose New Folder to create a folder for this specific message and then automatically move the message into the newly created folder...

Enter a folder name that'll help you remember what's inside, click "OK" and you're done. Next time you're reading a message, the folder you just created will be listed on the "Move" menu, so it'll be even easier.

Let's shift attention back to the left side of the Yahoo Mail screen before we're done, however, because it's pretty darn important to know how to get to these folders once created. Here's what the left side navigational column looks like:

See the tiny gray triangle adjacent to "FOLDERS" that's pointing towards the right? Click on it and you'll open up the list of your mail folders:

Click on one of the folder names and you'll be viewing the message or messages you've filed in that folder. Ready to go back to your Inbox? That link's on the top left too. Easy enough.

Oh, and if you want to create a bunch of folders without necessarily having messages to store in them all, the "+" symbol next to "FOLDERS" is useful too:

You can also use the keyboard shortcut of Cmd + Shift + E but i know I'm never going to remember that for something I'd use as infrequently as a create new folder feature.

In any case, that should get you started organizing your email in Yahoo Mail!