How to empty a Yahoo Mail box

November 15, 2005 10:56 PM

Yahoo Mail question. I have a 2MB of their “Mail plus” account which it is now 52% “Full” and is becoming very slow. I want to empty this box.

Right now I have over 1000 read-emails in my inbox and copies of 4600 emails that I sent out. Is there a simple way to transfer all those emails into a single accessible file somewhere else on my computer, for reference-sake, and start fresh with an empty box? Please answer s-l-o-w-l-y and s-i-m-p-l-y, if at all, so that I could figure it out

posted by growabrain to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Use the Webmail extension with Thunderbird to archive to mbox format. mobix is astandard format that pretty much any mail application will be able to read...
posted by Boobus Tuber at 11:10 PM on November 15, 2005

According to the Yahoo Mail Plus website, you should be able to set up the POP3 account feature and download all of your messages into a mail client (Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, etc.) for backup, then you can delete your current mail that you have in your Yahoo Mail account. You should also be able to send mail through a standard mail client as well if you need to reference any emails from the past.

I don't have Yahoo Mail Plus, but I do use the POP3 feature with gmail. This should work for you if Yahoo's POP3 access works like gmail's.
posted by Mijo Bijo at 11:12 PM on November 15, 2005

Best answer: In Yahoo you can archive your inbox and sent mail. go to mail options. archive. select inbox. select all items. specify where you want to save file (e.g., desktop), name file yahooinbox. press enter, and voila. doesn't take long on high-speed connection.
posted by madstop1 at 11:17 PM on November 15, 2005

madstop1, can you use that function even if you have a free Yahoo account? I've been trying to get myself out of Yahoo (because of their lack of POP3 for free accounts) but want to have access to my past e-mails.
posted by SeizeTheDay at 5:46 AM on November 16, 2005

SeizeTheDay: I don't think thats available to free accounts. I used fetchyahoo to do this. You can also use YoSucker. Both require Perl and a couple of CPAN modules installed.
posted by fjom at 8:23 AM on November 16, 2005

Clarification: I believe that is a 2 GIGABYTE account, not MEGABYTE.
posted by jmccorm at 8:55 AM on November 16, 2005

I have no idea if this is connected, but my yahoo mail (regular) account has been running very slow lately. A co-worker is having the same problem. Our mailboxes aren't very full, either. Perhaps the slowness is just something on their end?
posted by fillsthepews at 1:34 PM on November 16, 2005

Response by poster: Thank you, madstop, that was simple enough even for me.
posted by growabrain at 9:11 PM on November 17, 2005