How to Back Up Your Free Yahoo! Mail

This is a subject that I tried for quite some time to find a solution for and I am going to share it with you.

This is the simplest and easiest way to back up all your free Yahoo! email, even the folders!

There is a lot of information about different programs like YahooPOPs and others to be able to download your email onto your computer for back up and they just don’t work too good.

The program I happened to stumble across is called Zimbra Desktop and it is simplicity to use for this purpose. Actually it is a great email program to use to get ALL your email in one place, including your free Yahoo! email. the program is absolutely free to download.

All you do is download and install the program, select Yahoo! in the drop down, and it will ask you for your email address and password. Then it will download every email you have in the free Yahoo! email. This may take awhile depending on how many emails you have.

The problem I had was when it first tried it failed, but closing the program and then opening it again fixed that. To back up the email, you go into the “Preferences” and select the back up option in the menu on the right and it can either just back up a single folder or the whole thing.

It uses a high compression format to backup the emails. You will need to use a program like 7Zip to unzip them. You will have to unzip them twice because of the high compression.

The emails will be in standard .EML format that can be read by most email programs.

You can use Zimbra to get all your other emails into one central location; this is great if you have multiple Yahoo! or GMail addresses. It is a great time saver and so far has worked very well.

One of the things that I haven’t figured out though is how to get the address book to sync.

The other great reason to use this program if you are on the Yahoo! free email is to transfer your email to another email account.

Why would you need to do this?

For me, I have been with Yahoo! free email for over 11 years. It has been a workhorse. Even when GMail first came out, I wasn’t too impressed. I still am not too impressed with GMail, so I have stuck with Yahoo!.

Recently, Yahoo! has been dropping services like a shedding dog drop hair in the winter. They have also been trying to “improve” Yahoo! Mail. I tried the new mail and thought it was great, the tab interface was VERY handy.

They had it right and it worked well until they ‘improved’ it again and now it is a mess. It cuts off the bottom of emails, you sometimes can’t scroll through an email, sometimes the right side is missing, and sometimes you can’t even reply to a simple email without it being stopped for spam.

Enough is enough since now the older “new” mail is being phased out and if you don’t have the right browser will not work. Does the term ‘useless’ come to mind? I have no idea if the “Classic” interface will be available and if it isn’t, Yahoo! mail will not be my choise. I definitely will NOT pay to get “POP3 access when there are so many others that have it for free.

My problem is that I archived a TON of emails over the 11 years in that account. There was no way to get it out easily, until I discovered Zimbra.

So if you are in the same boat as me with the free Yahoo! mail, this is a great solution. I can actually move emails around to various accounts and back them up to my hard drive. I am going through the process of changing all of my subscriptions that are important to another account.

GMail does have a feature to move your email to a GMail account. I haven’t tried it as I am not in love with GMail as many are. I just don’t trust Google to be honest.

It is sad to see this happen, but in all my years on the Internet – it is expected. A program that is the ‘next best thing’ today may not be in the future. Remember MySpace, Ask Jeeves, AOL, CompuServe, Lycos, NetScape, and dozens of others? They were THE place to go in their time.

Times change and we need to change with it and continue on.

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Tagged As: Gmail, Yahoo! Free Email