Ya-nooooo! Yahoo Mail Purge ALL MAIL FOLDERS GONE!

YAHOOooooooooooooo! *splat*

So Yahoo! was recently bought out by Verizon. We all know the story - a sadly fallen great tech giant. It was a very slow fall. And sounded probably more like a small bump than the above alluded to 'splat'.

I have had a Yahoo! email account for many years, several accounts. One for home stuff - one for work stuff and another one for music projects - this one - the247s@yahoo...

I connect to it generally on my phone and on my computer using IMAP. I use I map because then it is possible to access to mail using webmail anywhere in the world, as well as from one's own laptop or computer.

I also thought that it was more likely that my computer would break or that my data would get corrupted or fried, or lost, which it is has before  (I have backups generally - sometime imperfect but there), than it is that a tech giant would lose all of your data.

My Yahoo Mail account says that I am using 0.01% of my allocated 1TB of data after all, so they appear to have some spare.

Boohoo!

However, all my mail in all the folders in my the247s yahoo account has now gone! As has pretty much of my Sent Mail.

This is typical of one of many folders.

Your folder is empty. Would you like to watch a Yahoo video? YaNoo! I would like kick a Yahoo executive, please. Yanoo!? 

Settings?

I had initially thought that this was because it was only showing mail dated within a certain time frame, but I can not find any settings which filter this to return it to viewing all.

Luckily I just bought a new laptops and one didn't connect to the web for a couple of weeks but has Apple Mail with (nearly all) of the mail still there. I run a partitioned drive for music vs admin, so my new laptop may similarly have the mail and folders there too. But I am taking noooooo chances and not connecting the old laptop to the web whilst I download and copy all the mail.

This is really important for me as all of my plugin serial numbers and receipts are in Yahoo Mail. That's got to be a couple of grands' worth of tech validations right there.

YA'WRONG! 

There is an entry on this forum which purports to have solved this mystery, with allegations that a third party piece of software is deleting everything past 30 days old. 

However this is not the case as the only other software I use apart from Apple Mail is TypeApp on my Android phone, which has not had a problem and I'm I have been using it for several months, and have accessed mail past 30 days on it before.

https://forums.yahoo.net/t5/Sending/Emails-not-showing-in-inbox-past-30-days/td-p/35259

I really don't think it's TypeApp though as I've used it a while and this wipeout has, I think, only happened recently.

HOW TO BACK UP MAIL FROM APPLE MAIL

I will address how to do this in another post but you can Export each folder (Click on the folder and then do Mailbox > Export Mailbox...

Or

You can drag and drop every mail into a folder individually. This means that you can read them using Preview, which is good. Sadly you can not select everything in the folder and then drag and drop - you can but it saves the individual mail as one file and it would appear as if you can only see the first email of the bunch.