Directory/Categories/Page Preview/Yahoo Mail

Yahoo Mail

Name: Yahoo Mail
Author: Yahoo

GoodBotVerifiedBOT

A proxy service used by Yahoo Mail to fetch and render link previews for URLs shared within email messages. Operated by Yahoo.

Operator website ↗

GoodBot

Assessment

Page Preview

What is Yahoo Mail?

The Yahoo Mail Proxy is a specialized agent operated by Yahoo that acts on behalf of users within the Yahoo Mail platform. When a user receives or composes an email containing a URL, this service fetches the target page to extract metadata, such as Open Graph tags, page titles, and thumbnail images. This allows the email interface to display a rich, interactive preview of the link rather than a plain text URL, improving the utility and visual presentation of shared content.

Helpful — It enhances the user experience in Yahoo Mail by generating rich link previews, such as titles and images, for shared content.

Identification

Bot name

Yahoo Mail

Operator

Yahoo

Why it crawls your site

This bot crawls specifically to support the 'link preview' feature in Yahoo Mail. It does not perform broad site indexing or deep crawling; instead, it performs targeted, single-page requests triggered by user activity. Website owners can verify the authenticity of this traffic by checking the User-Agent string against the official documentation provided by Yahoo, which confirms the bot's role in rendering previews for their mail service.

Block or allow Yahoo Mail

Block it

Add a Disallow rule for YahooMailProxy in your robots.txt file. You can also block at the server level using your web server configuration or CDN firewall rules to filter requests matching the user-agent string.

# Block Yahoo Mail from crawling your entire site
User-agent: YahooMailProxy
Disallow: /

# Allow Yahoo Mail full access
User-agent: YahooMailProxy
Allow: /