How To Close Yahoo Mail account???

December 26, 2013 10:31 AM

Wanting to close my Yahoo account. How would I do so and save all past e-mails.
posted by goalyeehah to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

I don't think you can simply close it and still have access to it......are you planning on importing it to another email service? GMail, IIRC, has a very simple email import which will allow you to keep all of your emails. I can't remember for any others.

I suppose you could download them onto your hard drive, and then they will be saved. Access may be a question.

What is your plan for email going forward?

When I lost my yahoo account, if it's not used for ~3 months, they shut it down for you. If there is a reason why you can't simply abandon it?
posted by China Grover at 10:42 AM on December 26, 2013

I don't know enough about how you want to maintain your old email to make a recommendation on that, but you kind find the instructions for deleting your Yahoo account (and a ton of others) at Just Delete Me.
posted by Silvertree at 10:55 AM on December 26, 2013 [2 favorites]

To save those past emails, your best bet is to use a program like Outlook to connect to Yahoo's servers using your credentials via IMAP. It actually used to cost money to "upgrade" your account to Yahoo Plus, but it looks like they now allow this access for free. Outlook will generate a PST file, which will contain all your email. You can preserve the PST that Outlook generates by backing it up onto another hard drive.
posted by antonymous at 11:40 AM on December 26, 2013

I was going to suggest the same as antonymous, but with Thunderbird, since I've had greater success exporting from Thunderbird to generic text format, compared to Outlook. Both programs can keep the files in their own format, replete with indexed search.

This is going to be the sort of thing where you set the archive process in motion before you go to bed, and let it run for a while-- it'll be downloading the entire history of your emails.
posted by Sunburnt at 1:17 PM on December 26, 2013 [1 favorite]

And, if you want to avoid Outlook, you could also use the Mozilla Thunderbird email client to download your yahoo email.
posted by sarah_pdx at 5:28 PM on December 26, 2013