“Help! I logged in to my Yahoo email account this morning, but found that all of my old emails like 10 years ago were lost. These emails hold many sentimental memories for me, also, some business data is pretty important to me. Can anyone help me recover them?”
“Oops! I mistakenly deleted my Yahoo email from trash, is there a way to get it back?”
“My emails in Yahoo trash were cleared after 7 days, how can I restore them?”
Are you facing a similar issue as above and looking for a solution? Calm down, I have tested all possible approaches and come to a conclusion in this article. Read on to learn how to recover Yahoo emails from 10 years ago, 2 years ago, months ago, etc.
Cisdem Data Recovery for Windows and Mac
Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7
Free Download macOS 10.15 or later
Yahoo Mail is an email service developed by Yahoo company, running on a web browser. It is totally free for personal uses, while offering subscription for advanced features.
Each platform has its own rules. Yahoo has published several policies:
To be honest, once your emails have been wiped from Yahoo's servers, the chances of recovering them are slim, unless you have backups on local devices, email clients, external drives, etc.
If Yahoo’s servers no longer hold your year-old emails due to account inactivity, your best hope lies in local backups or email client archives. Many users might not realize that they had stored copies of emails on their old devices or cloud backup services, especially if they used email clients like Microsoft Outlook and Thunderbird. Let’s dive into the steps!
Recall if you manually backed up your emails to a storage device or some cloud-based service. Anyway, try it first.
Tips:
The search keywords you type in can be “Outlook archive”, “Yahoo backup”, “email”, etc, or file extensions like “.PST” or “.MBOX”.
If you find PST or MBOX files, jump to #2 to learn how to open them in Outlook and Thunderbird.
An email client is a piece of software used to receive, send and manage emails. The common standalone email clients are MS Outlook and Thunderbird. If you had added your Yahoo account to them, they would auto store email data of Yahoo in a local .PST file/.MBOX file, or on a server.
Windows users: Go to File Explorer > Documents > Outlook Files, look for .PST files.
Mac users: Go to Finder app > Library > Thunderbird > Profiles, search for .MBOX files.
Note: The above just shows the file path, you can change the email client name as you need. For instance, to search files in Apple Mail on Mac, navigate to Finder app > Library > Mail...
For .PST files:
For .MBOX Files:
The process of manually checking where backups might exist is frustratingly time-consuming and easy to miss. In addition, if unfortunate, the decade-old drives or files may be damaged or corrupted.
In such cases, a specialized data recovery application called Cisdem Data Recovery is the troubleshooter. It is capable of deep scanning all the drives and cloud services on your device to find your email backups. The whole scanning process is extremely fast. And you can pause or resume it at your will.
Furthermore, this software can restore lost email client files or raw email fragments, even from corrupted drives.
Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7 Free Download macOS 10.15 or later
Things get a lot easier if you want to retrieve Yahoo emails that have been deleted or gone missing in the last 7 days.
In most cases, we scroll through pages in Yahoo Inbox to find important emails. However, your emails may also be misjudged as spams, or moved to other folders. Directly skipping them can cause you to miss your desired emails.
Note: If your email was deleted recently and still stored in Trash folder, you can check the box next to your required email, and restore it Inbox.
When a technical issue arises, product’s support service is always a solution. Although there are limited chances that Yahoo support can help restore missing emails successfully, it is still worth a try.
Note: If you are a premium user, you can contact a paid support agent on the Help Central page, instead of choosing Mail Restore.
Losing emails in Yahoo is painful, even if it is possible to recover them. In our daily life, we should take some measures to prevent future losses.
1. How far back can Yahoo restore emails?
Regardless of whether the email was received 10 years ago, two years ago or a few months ago, only deleted or lost emails within the past 7 days can be recovered. And the retrieval isn’t always successful.
2. Does Yahoo delete old emails after 10 years?
NO, Yahoo can keep your emails forever as long as you are active in your account. Only inactivity over 12 months will cause content deletion.
3. Is there a way to recover an old Yahoo email?
Once your old emails were cleared from Yahoo’s servers, Yahoo doesn’t support getting them back to Inbox. Yet, if there are any email backups or fragments on local storage, dedicated data recovery software like Cisdem can rescue your data and restore them in a safer location.
Zoey shows a great interest in what she does. Although not long with Cisdem, she has possessed a professional understanding of data recovery.
