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.

> 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".

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.

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

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?

Now what?

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

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