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

6/24/2026 at 1:43:53 PM

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.

by cableshaft

6/24/2026 at 5:24:00 PM

I totally agree with you. I wish they had tried to send me reminders to download my emails atleast. Sad.

by neya

6/24/2026 at 1:42:18 PM

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.

by gdulli

6/24/2026 at 5:23:21 PM

I hate how normalized this has become. Apparently Google has also taken the same route with Gmail.

by neya

6/24/2026 at 8:20:18 AM

> 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".

by KomoD

6/24/2026 at 4:55:20 AM

I read my Yahoo account with Thunderbird, which stores messages on my hard drive.

by orionblastar

6/24/2026 at 6:23:22 AM

I wish I did this. Too late..

by neya

6/24/2026 at 10:58:10 AM

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?

by carlosjobim

6/24/2026 at 5:22:44 PM

Unfortunately not.

by neya

6/24/2026 at 5:54:50 AM

Now what?

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

by dotcoma

6/24/2026 at 6:23:11 AM

Thanks, I'm already on Proton, just wanted to know if there is a way to recover the lost emails...

by neya

6/24/2026 at 1:25:08 PM

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.

by al_borland

6/24/2026 at 5:37:53 AM

[flagged]

by marton-laszlo-a