Ask HN: Yahoo deleted all my emails. Now what?

15 points | by neya 3 days ago

8 comments

  • cableshaft 2 days ago
    My Yahoo Mail had all my emails from when I was in college on it (back when people used to chat with each other via email, also AIM). I still used it sometimes for collecting junk mail and as a backup address for my gmail, or to reread a few of old college emails once in a blue moon, but otherwise rarely logged in. Apparently it had been a year because I got that same message as you did. What a shock.

    Never been an issue until then (I must have gone over a year without logging in at some point before then and still was able to log in), and then suddenly 'screw you, a chunk of your past is gone with no way to recover it'.

    I was so upset when I realized what happened. I'm still annoyed by it. I know I should have exported it all away a long time ago so it's on me, but I didn't think to do so, I had gotten so used to it always being there.

    A year of inactivity before total deletion is way too short for email, imo.

    • neya 2 days ago
      I totally agree with you. I wish they had tried to send me reminders to download my emails atleast. Sad.
  • orionblastar 3 days ago
    I read my Yahoo account with Thunderbird, which stores messages on my hard drive.
    • neya 3 days ago
      I wish I did this. Too late..
      • haute_cuisine 1 day ago
        If mail is deleted, the deletion could have synced to your email client as well.
  • KomoD 3 days ago
    > Is there any way to recover my old emails?

    Ask Yahoo. I'm guessing no, since it says "we also deleted all of your emails".

  • gdulli 2 days ago
    Dropbox did this to me with my actual data. I misunderstood it as a service where I could upload some data, uninstall the client, and expect the data to be there as long as the company still exists.
    • neya 2 days ago
      I hate how normalized this has become. Apparently Google has also taken the same route with Gmail.
  • moomoo11 7 hours ago
    i too lost all my yahoo emails. sad.
  • carlosjobim 3 days ago
    You don't have any old machine laying around or any old hard drive from when you might have read your Yahoo emails with a mail client?
    • neya 2 days ago
      Unfortunately not.
  • dotcoma 3 days ago
    Now what?

    Now it’s time to pay for a good email service, like Tuta, Proton or Fastmail.

    • neya 3 days ago
      Thanks, I'm already on Proton, just wanted to know if there is a way to recover the lost emails...
      • al_borland 2 days ago
        Only Yahoo support can say for sure. Likely not, unless they were to compress and archive them for some period of time before actually deleting them.
  • marton-laszlo-a 3 days ago
    [flagged]