However, there are some good reasons why you may want to register with Yahoo:

• Read and/or post mail for any group you belong to via the web from any PC
• Change your email settings for all groups with one click via the web
• Change your email address for any group using up to 5 different addresses
• View all Yahoo groups you belong to on a single web page called "My Groups"

If you want to read your mail via the Internet instead of via your regular email program, you must register with Yahoo to obtain a Yahoo userid and password.  Then you must validate each mail address you are using with Yahoogroups to associate it with your Yahoo userid.  This enables Yahoo to recognize you on the Internet and provide access to all the Yahoogroups that you have joined via one or more email addresses.  Once you have completed the registration and email address validation process, you can then login to Yahoogroups from anywhere on the Internet, read your email, post messages, change your email settings, download files, participate in polls, etc.  You can also use the handy "My Groups" web page to display all the Yahoogroups you belong to.  Here is the 4 step process step by step:

A.  Register with www.yahoogroups.com to obtain userid and password.

If you want to register with www.yahoogroups.com in order to have Internet access to all your Yahoo Groups, go to the following "How to Register" site and follow the steps outlined:

1. Click on "registration" which will take you to a web page with form to fill out to obtain yahoo userid and password.
    
2. Submit the form by pressing "Submit this form" at the bottom of the above page.
    
3. Write down your id and password and save them for future use.  (Note that when you login on your own PC for the first time, you can check the box to indicate that you want www.yahoogroups.com  to remember your Yahoo userid and password. 

B.  Sign-in and setup your account with up to 5 associated email addresses.

Now that you have a Yahoo userid and password, you can proceed to setup your Yahoo Groups account continuing on the same page above.  Follow these account setup steps:

1. Sign in by clicking on "Sign-in".  Be sure to check the box remember login so you will not need to login each time. This will minimize the times you need to re-enter the password, however www.yahoogroups.com will still occasionally asks for it to re-verify who you are.
    
2. Click on "Membership Wizard" to add up to 5 personal email ids to your Yahoogroups account.
    
3. Perform the following steps using the wizard. Click "Continue" to proceed using default yahoo id. 

• On the next page below, click on "Add new email address" to enter new email address.
   
• After entering all the email addresses, click on the "Verify email" link which will take you to another page with message saying Yahoogroups has sent verification message to the email address you specified. Then it will prompt you for a verification number that will come in an email message.
   
• Wait for the email, and then open it and copy the verification number from the email to the web page prompt field and hit enter.  Note that if some of your email addresses are for different PC's located at different locations such as work, home, or laptop; you may have to validate some addresses at a different time when you are on the computer where you can receive the email validation sent to each email address.  To continue this process later, click on the "Membership Wizard" link above to continue.
   
• Repeat this for up to 5 emails.  After entering and verifying 1 to 5 personal emails, click "finished".

C.  Select email address to be associated with each Yahoo group.

1. Select a profile (email id) to use with each Yahoogroup you belong to, and press "Continue".
    
2. Select which profiles are allowed to be automatically added to groups by moderators, and press "Continue".

D.  View all your Yahoo Groups

You can now view all your Yahoo Groups at this web site:

http://groups.yahoo.com/mygroups

You can click on the group name to visit each group web site and perform all the functions available such as reading archived mail, posting messages, downloading files, entering polls, and changing your email mode or default email address for each group.  To change mode, click on "Edit My Membership".  The modes available are as follows:

1. Normal - receive each email individually when mailed.
2. Digest - receive 1 email with up to 25 emails batched together with a subject index.
3. Nomail - stop sending all mail to this group (you can still read email via the web).

Congratulations you can now access Yahoogroups via the web anytime anywhere by going to the above "My Groups Page".

There hundreds of thousands of Yahoo email groups.  To find a group of interest to you, go to the Yahoogroups home page and enter keyword search such as "Rotary District 6950":

www.yahoogroups.com

In addition, there are thousands of Yahoo groups that have public archived email messages which you can search.  There are over 700 million archived messages on just about any topic you can imagine.  Go this Yahoogroups search page and try a key word search such as "PDF Utility" and get 31,000 hits.

http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search

I hope you found this step by step guide to getting registered useful.  If you have additional suggestions, please email them to the webmaster.