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InquiringMind · 20 Jun 2023, 01:47 AM

Hello,

I came across this thread while browsing the forum.

There is something that people need to be aware of when pursuing these large storage space email providers.

Yahoo may allow you 1TB of storage space; but, they only allow you to search or download by IMAP 10,000 emails per folder.

For example: I have a friend who asked me to help them with their Yahoo account. They had approximately 500,000 UNREAD emails in their INBOX folder. They are the type of user who looks at the subject line and never opens or deletes the email. The account became so slow it was for all intents and purposes unusable.

I tried to use IMAP to download the emails to Outlook or Thunderbird and I could not retrieve more than the most recent 10,000 emails in the Inbox. I then tried to sort the emails by sender so they could delete ones that are unneeded, but the web interface chokes and stalls. We then started a plan of spending a certain amount of time every day to create a folder for each month of the 12 years that they had the account for and offload 9,999 emails or less to each folder. The problem there was that they had subscribed to every mailing list know to humankind and were receiving approximately 300 emails everyday. This shoveling of sand against the tide eventually led to us giving up. The email account is now just a metastasizing mess.

So, you can get an email account that gives you a bajillion bytes of space, but if you cannot cull your emails to less than 10,000 per folder and cannot create enough folders, and cannot sort more than 10,000 emails per folder, the space in the account becomes nearly useless.

HTH

20 Jun 2023, 01:47 AM	#15
InquiringMind Senior Member Join Date: Apr 2015 Posts: 114	Hello, I came across this thread while browsing the forum. There is something that people need to be aware of when pursuing these large storage space email providers. Yahoo may allow you 1TB of storage space; but, they only allow you to search or download by IMAP 10,000 emails per folder. For example: I have a friend who asked me to help them with their Yahoo account. They had approximately 500,000 UNREAD emails in their INBOX folder. They are the type of user who looks at the subject line and never opens or deletes the email. The account became so slow it was for all intents and purposes unusable. I tried to use IMAP to download the emails to Outlook or Thunderbird and I could not retrieve more than the most recent 10,000 emails in the Inbox. I then tried to sort the emails by sender so they could delete ones that are unneeded, but the web interface chokes and stalls. We then started a plan of spending a certain amount of time every day to create a folder for each month of the 12 years that they had the account for and offload 9,999 emails or less to each folder. The problem there was that they had subscribed to every mailing list know to humankind and were receiving approximately 300 emails everyday. This shoveling of sand against the tide eventually led to us giving up. The email account is now just a metastasizing mess. So, you can get an email account that gives you a bajillion bytes of space, but if you cannot cull your emails to less than 10,000 per folder and cannot create enough folders, and cannot sort more than 10,000 emails per folder, the space in the account becomes nearly useless. HTH