Topic: Yahoo email, old emails are gone? (Read 412 times)

Is this for sure?

I have one email that I haven't used for a long time but when I've opened it, it didn't required me anything and nothing usual has happened. I don't know for sure that others have experienced the same thing as mine.

I also didn't visit it once per month but it's been a lot of months since I've visited it but when I've reopened it, it's still fine.

Usually, if you do not open your email account for more than 6 months, the email provider can lock your account temporarily and then after a year, they can delete your account. If you want to reopen your email account, you need to verify that you are the owner, which will be a reset for the email. I have had that experience before. You need to check all your email accounts at least once a month to avoid the temporary lock.

Me too I had many old photos from my flip phones days stored on my Yahoo email that are now gone forever.

Encountered this thread today but I had the same experience when I checked my oldest yahoo mail last year. I also thought that someone hacked my account as nothing was left. I actually panicked because I didn't know at that time that yahoo has that protocol. I just felt sad that my oldest mails were gone and maybe old photos that I forgot to save.

I had the same thing with my Gmail , but it was just bugged out for a few days then i reloged and it was normal

Having seeing this I tried logging on my email for yahoo and there are 0 emails in there.

I had almost thesame issue with the email provider but later remembered that they actually had a policy of deleting mails of users who failed to login into their email addresses for certain period of time. Maybe that's what happened to Op. I actually had mine for more 10 years and lots of my very old emails were deleted. Guess they've changed that policy by now, probably due to competitions from email providers that keep users email as long as possible, whether they login or not

I haven't used yahoo email before, so I can't give an exact answer on this one, but could it be that your email account was full and some old messages got deleted? I remember that in my first email account which is almost 20 years old that there were tons of old emails in, but eventually the storage was full and I never deleted any emails. After some time I noticed that I was getting new emails again and this was because some emails (older than 5 years) just got deleted.

Sentosiro, sometimes they can be "deleted" to the trash folder of the extension you've installed, if you have been installing any of them. If you're looking for a good addon or extension, which should organize your emails and help you with spending less time for it, I can give you this purposeful messages related site, which can open your eyes on some functions in email-conversations, which you never thought they exist.

I can assure you all of my old emails are gone.

What? it should be quick if the specs of your computer is good and you bought it as brand new. I have a decent computer and the specs seems reliable and I did visited them.

And it just took me 5 secs to load my email.

I just checked my yahoo now out of curiosity, and it is so slow that my computer lagged.
And I own a new computer that should be able to handle yahoo email on webmail.
Would not use again.

Can you even imagine what could happen if yahoo deletes hundreds of emails???

I had an email made in about 2008 and can't recover because I need to remember the answer to security question.
There is no human support in yahoo so the robot sends me back to the same thing over and over again...


But whatever. Their company is mainly run by women

Let me throw some light on this discussion and give you a more clearer picture about this.. as i'm one of the oldest user of Yahoo and have travelled all the way using it in every possible way for more than 16 years...
(whether it was by using their email service, chatroom, conference, those animated smileys, fun software's that were developed by third parties etc.)

To begin with, Yahoo was not like this before.... during the old days when Gmail was not much in the picture... the majority users would prefer Yahoo over Hotmail or Rediffmail... because yahoo had Chatroom's and Conference Room(which was really fun) which made it stand out from it's competitors during that era...

With time things started to change... the issues started to arise slowly since the Yahoo Chatroom's started to get flooded with bots (posting adult contents, scam messages/offers/surveys, Virus/Trojan links etc.) everywhere on each Category/Group of the Chatrooms... and at the same time some developers created Software's that could create email ids in Bulk, you could literally create like 1000 email ids in a go..

For instance the Yahoo Bot ID Maker software had a simple interface with a browse button to upload your list (.txt) file containing the bots (Email id that needs to be created) which was in the following format;
[email protected]:123456
[email protected]:123456
[email protected]:123456
...
...
...
& so on..

Over here the format is simple, the first part means the Email Id... followed by the second part which means the Password..

When millions of Email Ids were created in such a way then Yahoo decided to start dropping the bombs by Deactivating/Suspending a lot of Inactive/Suspicious email ids... with an assumption that there were created using the Yahoo Bot Maker software's...
I have no idea about the detection mechanism that they deployed during that time... but for sure that was not any AI based thing.... but they did it somehow with human resources itself... although it was not 100% accurate...

In your case your emails got deleted since you didn't logged-in to your email id for a longer span of period... but trust me you should find yourself as lucky... you were almost close to loosing your email id...
You want to know how?

You were actually on the first phase (Phase 1)

When you reach Phase 2 (inactive for a more longer span of time), you will eventually loose your email id and the same email id would be deleted from their Database and anyone else could again create this email id from their official website... funny, isn't it?
Trust me, this is how Yahoo works... whether you like it or not...

Long back... i lost one of my email id this way... which was a 5-char email id but then as it was unique word and none had claimed it.... i was actually able to register that email id again....

That been said... on the other hand with Gmail, this is not the case.... once you register an email id.... it's Yours, you are the solo owner of that email id.... you can even login after a decade and nothing would happen to your email id... they won't get deleted or available to be registered for anyone else on their website....
For future important emails do stick with Gmail and you can always backup your emails locally... just in-case required...

So... concluding statement there are hardly any chances that you could get back those emails now... still you could try your luck by contacting Yahoo Customer Care with least hope and fingers crossed...

Hope so some miracle would happen and you get back your important emails...

Had also checked mine and like yours still the Yahoo mail Welcome greeting from the very moment created the account still there and it was wayback 2005 so I think either you had mistakenly deleted your old mails or it goes in your archives or spam messages

Do you still have to pay for a Yahoo email? I feel like you should consider moving to another service provider. is there a reason you've stuck with Yahoo for this long?

Yahoo is now with Oath so I think the merge has affected your email. But I've checked my old yahoo and it didn't have any single change so I'm also curious on how your important emails were gone.

Backupping email? how to do that?

I had a yahoo mail that was created way back 2006 all of my old emails and files are there up to 2016, then it required me to have a recovery option for me to continue using the email and i didn't bother using it for 3 years then recently i needed that email back for my steam account since i wanna buy some new games through the summer sale so i went through the recovery process and voila! everything's gone.

After doing some research and finding this page, looks like you are out of luck. In order to be able to recover anything that is actually deleted you have to do it within a week of them being gone, and even then the chances are slim. So if your emails aren't in some magical hidden folder, they're likely gone.

Lesson: Always backup your email, also use a provider that doesn't clean house when you are gone for a few years. You can't really expect them to hold all of that data when you didn't login for so long.