How to Recover Yahoo Emails from 10 Years Ago [Helpful Guide]

Are you in a similar situation and looking for a useful Yahoo old mail recovery solution? Here are the good news: we’ve tested all possible approaches and collected a list of feasible ways in this article. Check out to recover Yahoo emails from 10 years ago, 2 years ago, months ago, etc. now!

 Cisdem Data Recovery for Windows and Mac

Recover Old Yahoo Emails from Many Years Ago

• Recover both recently and permanently deleted Yahoo emails
• Restore old Yahoo emails from various devices: PC, Mac, Android phone, USB, SD card, etc.
• Recover both email contents and attachments
• Also retrieve emails from Gmail, Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook, etc.
• Repair damaged Yahoo attachments: videos, photos, documents.
• Preview documents before recovery
• Support retrieving 1000+ file types: videos, photos, documents, emails, archives, bookmarks, etc.
• Additional features: recover from NAS/Linux/iCloud/Crashed PC, create disk back up, create bootable installer, etc.

Free Download Windows 10 or later Free Download macOS 10.15 or later

Can You Recover Old Yahoo Emails?

Yes, we can, but it is often a challenge.

For Yahoo emails that are deleted in the past 7 days, we can easily recover from the Trash folder, or ask help from Yahoo Support by submitting a request when they are not available in your Yahoo trash. 

For Yahoo emails that are automatically deleted by Yahoo due to inactive account for more than 12 months, it is not possible to recover, because the emails have been wiped from Yahoo server. Even, sometimes in this situation, your account may be removed and you have no access to the account anymore.

While for Yahoo emails that you’ve kept them in your Inbox for more than 10 years or longer, and you are still an active Yahoo email user, as long as you did not delete them, they are still there and you can filter or search easily in the client. If you’ve deleted, it is not possible to recover them from Yahoo server, but it is possible to recover when you once backed up the emails to your computer, mobile phone, USB or other physical storage media. And the recovery rate depends on how frequently you used the media since then, and how much new data you’ve added to the storage device, the more, the less likely you can recover the old Yahoo emails.

Anyway, it is always worth a try on the following methods to recover your old Yahoo emails, if they mean a lot to you.

How to Recover Old Yahoo Emails from 10 Years Ago?

If Yahoo’s servers no longer hold your year-old emails due to account inactivity, or your Yahoo emails have been in the box for more than 10 years and lost, 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. Let’s dive into the steps!

#1. Check Local or Cloud Backups

Recall if you manually backed up your emails to a storage device or some cloud-based service. Anyway, try it first.

Check Hard Drive/External Drive/USB Backups

1. Connect your old storage device to a computer if necessary.
2. For Windows: Press “Windows + E” keys to open File Explorer > choose a location on the left > type in keywords at the top right to search for email-related files.For Mac: Open Finder app in the dock > locate your drive > type in keywords for email search.

Check Google Drive/Dropbox/One Drive Copies

1. Log in to your account. (Here shows Google Drive.)
2. Search a specific email through the search box or Advanced Search.

#2. Recover from Email Clients

You may have added your Yahoo account to the email client on your device, such as Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, Spark, Mozilla Thunderbird, etc. An email client is a piece of software used to receive, send and manage emails. If you’ve dis-enabled the Yahoo email sync in your email client for a while, then you can restore the Yahoo emails via the local backup of such an email client programs. 

• Step 1. Locate the Yahoo emails from a local backup, according to your email client and operating system.
  If you are using Microsoft Outlook:
  For Windows users --- C:\Users\[username]\Documents\Outlook Files
  For macOS users --- /Users/<username>/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook 15 Profiles/Main Profile
  
  If you are using Apple Mail
  ~/Library/Mail/V(version number)/
  
  If you are using Mozilla Thunderbird
  For Windows users --- C:\Users\<Your Username>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\<Your Profile Name>\
  For macOS users --- ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/
• Step 2. Open or import the Yahoo email copies in the format of MBOX, EML, EMLX, MSG or PDF to your email client, you will be able to regain access to the old Yahoo emails.

#3. Recover Yahoo Emails from 10 Years Ago Using Cisdem Data Recovery

The process of manually checking backups is frustrating sometimes, time consuming and fail to recover. In addition, if unfortunate, the attachments in the old Yahoo emails may be damaged or corrupted.

If you have a good habit of backing up emails in the past, or there indeed was a local back up in your email client before, even the backups are not available not, then a specialized data recovery application called Cisdem Data Recovery is the troubleshooter. It is capable of deep scanning the media where the backup was stored to recover Yahoo emails. The whole scanning process is extremely fast, and you can pause or resume it at your will.

Furthermore, this software can restore attachments like videos, photos, documents and so on from a lost Yahoo email. Even it can repair the attachment if there is a corruption. Not only recovers emails, Cisdem Data Recovery supports a wide range of files, including documents, bookmarks, archives, recordings, audio, video, photos, vector graphics, etc.

Main Features of Cisdem Data Recovery

• Recover lost data from both internal and external storage devices
• Support 1000+ file types
• Repair damaged videos, photos, documents
• Recover unsaved documents
• Applicable to different data loss situations
• Support crashed PC/Mac data recovery
• Preview files before recover
• Save recovered files to local drive or to cloud
• Scan fast, pause, stop, resume with ease

How to Recover Yahoo Emails from 10 Years Ago?

1. Get this email data recovery tool installed on your device.
   Free Download Windows 10 or later Free Download macOS 10.15 or later
2. Launch the software, select a drive or location where your email data might be stored.
3. Continue with Search for Lost Data, the program will start fast scanning.
4. Under the Type tab, choose Emails, all the recoverable PST, MBOX, EML emails will show up.
5. Select the email files you need, and click Recover button.
6. Choose a destination path to save your restored email data. Then you can open them with your email client.
7. (Optional) If the file in the email attachment is damaged, extract the file and save it to your device, then relaunch Cisdem, scan the drive and use the File Repair tool to fix the damaged files.

How to Recover Deleted Yahoo Emails within 7 Days?

Things get a lot easier if you want to retrieve Yahoo emails that have been deleted or gone missing in the last 7 days.

#1. Restore from Trash

Yahoo email has a trash folder to hold the recently deleted emails in the last 7 days. If the deletion doesn’t exceed 7 days, then go checking the trash and restore.

1. Log into your Yahoo email account.
2. Go to Trash from the left panel.
3. Select the deleted Yahoo email and click on Restore to Inbox.
4. Then check the email in your box.

#2. Contact Yahoo Support for Help

When a technical issue arises, product’s support service is always a solution, so is Yahoo Support. According to Yahoo official, they will try everything they can do to recover a deleted or missing Yahoo email in the last 7 days, by submitting a restore request. 

1. Log into your Yahoo account, visit this page https://help.yahoo.com/kb/recover-lost-deleted-emails-sln2552.html.
2. Click on Send a Restore Request.
3. Follow the instruction to provide details about your problem.
4. Submit your store request and wait for a response.

#3. Check Other Folders in Your Yahoo Email

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. You should check every folder in your account to make sure they are not deleted at all. 

1. Log in to your Yahoo Mail account on a browser.
2. Expand More menu and choose Spam folder. (or any other folder)
3. Type keyword about your email in the Search box to locate it in the selected folder.
4. Hit Advanced icon to make a more specific search.

Avoid Losing Emails in the Future

Losing emails in Yahoo is painful, even though it is possible to recover them. In our daily life, we should take some measures to prevent future losses.

• Log in to your Yahoo account regularly to keep it active.
• Set up forwarding emails to other frequently-used email address.
• Upload Yahoo emails to internal/external drives or cloud services periodically.
• Export Yahoo emails to a client routinely.

FAQs

1. Where are my old Yahoo emails?

As long as you did not delete them, they are still on the server in your Inbox or other folders.

Also, you can find a local copy on your device, if you’ve added the Yahoo account to a email client app.

2. Does Yahoo delete old emails?

Sometimes.

Yahoo can keep your emails forever, as long as you are an active user. But inactivity over 12 months will make Yahoo delete the old emails, even your account automatically.
Also, according to Yahoo, it will automatically empty emails in Trash after 7 days and Spam folder after 30 days.

3. How far back can Yahoo restore emails?

Regardless 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 by Yahoo. And the retrieval isn’t always successful.

4. Is there a way to recover an old Yahoo email?

It depends.

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.

5. Why Yahoo deleted all my emails in the last 12 months?

According to Yahoo, it considers accounts that not using the mailbox for 12 months or more as inactive, and it will stop receiving emails, also delete all the emails since then. 

If you are still an active user, but lost the emails, it may be caused by following factors:

• Sync glitch
• Inappropriate configuration in email client
• Hacked account
• Human errors to mistakenly delete or move
• Yahoo server issues

Summary

It is not easy to recover an old and deleted Yahoo email, but as long as you once backed up the files onto a storage device, it is possible to restore, using free tips or professional data recovery programs. Also, we should check Trash or other folders to see if the emails are moved to a wrong place. The most important, we should always back up important files on a regular basis.