Performing a Full Backup Of a Yahoo! Mail Plus Account

It’s not the easiest thing in the world to perform a full backup of a Y! Mail account, but it can be done and once you go through the process it’s fairly straightforward.

The way to download everything in your Y! Mail account is via POP. This can be done the paid way or the free way.

Paid way: Yahoo! Mail Plus account.
Free way: FreePOPs or YPOPs!

My recommendation is to use the paid way. Why? Because when performing a backup via a free method, Yahoo! may halt the transfer if you download too much. I ran into this problem personally and it’s one of the reasons I have a Y! Mail Plus account to begin with. When you’re using Y! Mail’s official POP servers, you can download as much as you want without fear of the transfer being halted.

The rest of this tutorial is going to go on the assumption you have a Y! Mail Plus account. If you want to use the free way, be my guest, but don’t be surprised if after downloading a few thousand mails that Y! Mail halts the POP download for a few days – yes, days.

Understanding how downloading mail from Y! Mail works with POP

Because of the limitations of POP, mail can only be downloaded from the Inbox. That’s it. In order to get the mail from all your other folders, you’ll have to do what I call flip-flopping. How it works is like this:

Flip: You move mail from the folder you want backed up to the Y! Mail inbox, then use a mail client to download the mail.

Flop: After the download is complete, you move the mail in the Y! Mail inbox back to where it was originally.

You repeat this process until every one of your folders has been successfully downloaded.

The suggested mail client to use for backup is Windows Live Mail

The only reason I suggest using WLmail is because of the way it stores email.

Outlook Express 6..

..uses DBX files, and those things are evil. If one goes corrupt, there’s basically no way to fix it.

Outlook..

..as in the full Outlook, uses a proprietary PST file to store all mail data. This means you are absolutely required to use MS Outlook just to use the thing, and that’s annoying.

Mozilla Thunderbird..

..uses MBOX files. This is a relatively easy format to work with and can hold tens of thousands of emails easily – but – if one goes corrupt, it’s almost just as bad as having an Outlook Express 6 DBX go corrupt. True, you can actually fix MBOX files, but you really don’t want to take the risk.

Windows Live Mail..

..out of all the clients has the absolute best way of storing emails. Each mail is stored as an individual EML file. Yes, each EML contains any file attachments an email would have. EMLs can be read easily by any mail client and is not proprietary to any software or operating system. In addition, if one mail happens to go corrupt, it only applies to that one email and not a whole bunch of them.

As icing on the cake, WLmail stores mail in a folder that can easily be burned to DVD for simple retrieval later. All you have to do is backup one folder, and it’s a done deal.

Preparing for backup – Y! Mail

Step 1.

Create a folder called _inbox in your folder list, like this:

Why the underscore (_) in front of the word? It’s so _inbox is always listed first in the list. It also makes it easier to spot so you don’t accidentally move mail somewhere else.

Step 2.

Move all the mail in your inbox to _inbox.

Go to the Inbox, perform a select-all by clicking the checkbox directly under the Delete button as shown below:

Then click Move then _inbox, like this:

Yes, _inbox will be first because of that underscore you put in the title of the folder.

Step 3.

Set up a temporary filter to move all new incoming mail to _inbox.

Click Options, then More options on the far right side:

Click Filters on the left:

Click the Add Filter button:

Enter the filer name as _inbox.

Next to sender, drop down the menu and change to does not contain.

Next to Move to Folder, drop down the menu and change to _inbox.

When done it will look like this:

Click the Save Changes button at the top:

Click the Back to Mail button on left:

Step 4.

Send a test mail to yourself to make sure filter is working.

This is easy enough to do. Compose a new email, send to yourself, check mail and see if it lands in the _inbox folder. If it does, the filter is working.

Why did we do all this?

You’re going to be using the Inbox to be download mail you want to backup from other folders, so you don’t want any new emails getting in there while performing your backup.

Setting up Windows Live Mail

If you don’t have Windows Live Mail, download it from http://download.live.com. The minimum requirement to run WLmail is Windows XP or greater (it won’t work on Windows 2000).

Once installed you will be prompted to create a new email account. Follow along with the instructions below once you’re ready to set up the account.

If you already have WLmail installed, click Add e-mail account on the left sidebar:

..then follow along with the instructions below.

First Screen

Enter your full Yahoo! email address
Enter your Yahoo! password
Check off "Remember password"
Set your Display Name as your name
Check off "Manually configure server settings for e-mail account"

It should look similar to this when done:

Click Next.

Second Screen

Select the incoming server as POP3.
Type in the incoming server as plus.pop.mail.yahoo.com
Type in the port as 110.
Type in the Login ID as your full Yahoo! email address.
Type in the outgoing server as plus.smtp.mail.yahoo.com
Type in the port for that server as 25.
Check off the box "My outgoing server requires authentication"

It should look similar to this when done:

Click Next.

Third Screen

Click Finish.

Checking mail server settings

Right-click the name of the account, which is Yahoo (your Yahoo ID), on the left sidebar, and select Properties:

Click the Advanced tab

Outgoing mail (SMTP) should be 25.
Incoming mail (POP3) should be 110.
The two checkboxes for SSL should be UNCHECKED.
Server timeout is set to 1 minute.
"Break apart messages larger than.." should be UNCHECKED.
"Leave a copy of messages on server" should be CHECKED.
"Remove from server after.." should be UNCHECKED.
"Remove from server when deleted from Deleted Items" should be UNCHECKED.

When finished it should look like this:

Click Apply then OK.

Disabling junk filters

Since all the mail in your Y! Mail account is not junk, you do not want WLmail to make any as such accidentally.

On the right side of WLmail, click the icon next to the brush, and select "Safety Options", like this:

From the pop-up window that appears, select the Options tab, then choose "No Automatic Filtering", like this:

Make sure the two checkboxes at bottom are also UNCHECKED.

Click Apply then OK.

Windows Live Mail is ready to go at this point.

Creating folders the same as you have in Y! Mail in WLmail

These are the folders I have in my Y! Mail account:

With the exception of _inbox, I want to recreate this in WLmail.

Right-click the name of your account in WLmail, and select "New Folder":

Type in the name of your new folder:

Click OK.

The new folder is now in WLmail:

I repeat this for all my other folders:

Backing up a folder from Y! Mail to Windows Live Mail

Select the folder you want to backup in Y! Mail, then select every mail in that folder:

Click Move then Inbox (Inbox and not _inbox):

Click on Inbox to confirm all your mails have been moved:

Go to WLmail, click Sync:

IMPORTANT NOTE: Do not use your Y! Mail inbox while the POP download is taking place. Wait until the download is completed first before going back to Y! Mail again.

When the download is completed, confirm that the number of new emails matches what’s in the Y! Mail inbox:

Move the mail from WLmail’s inbox to the appropriate folder:

Go back to Y! Mail, go to the inbox, perform a select-all:

Click Move then select the folder where the mail originally was moved from:

Repeat process for every folder you have in Y! Mail until everything is backed up.

Special instructions for Sent folder

The Sent folder is the most annoying to deal with because you’re not allowed to move anything to/from it via the Move menu – HOWEVER – you can click and drag mail out of Sent anywhere you wish.

Getting the Sent folder backed up can be done like this:

Add a new folder in Y! Mail called _sent, like this:

Go to the Sent folder and perform a select-all:

Move your mouse to the message list, left-click hold, drag to _sent, let go.

Be VERY CAREFUL when you do this because it’s almost too easy to drag-and-drop to a place where you don’t want the Sent mail to go.

If you have thousands and thousands of mails in your Sent folder, my recommendation is to only move 500 at a time.

If you try something like this:

..you may actually crash your Y! Mail account. And no, I’m not kidding. You’ll receive an "Error 999" or "Error 15" or something of that nature. That’s more or less confirmation your account crashed and will be un-crashed in about 5 to 15 minutes.

When you’re able to get your mail from Sent to _sent, perform a folder backup as outlined above. When you have your Sent mail in _sent, you can then move it wherever you wish, including the Inbox.

The last folder to backup is..?

The folder you want to backup last is _inbox. During this whole time you probably received a few mails in there from the filter you set up earlier. That’s fine.

Once you’ve backed up all your other folders and Inbox is empty, move the mail from _inbox to Inbox, then perform a download in WLmail.

After all mail is backed up..

Do the following immediately after your mail is backed up:

In Y! Mail, go to Options/More Options/Filters and remove the _inbox filter so new mail now arrives in Inbox like it used to.
Check the _inbox folder in Y! Mail to make sure it’s empty. If it is, remove it.