Reclaiming Storage Space on Yahoo Mail

In follow-up to my post about Yahoo Mail reducing its free storage limit, you might be thinking about cleaning up your old emails to free up space. Here are some of my recommendations. Keep in mind that these instructions are based on the current capabilities of Yahoo Mail on desktop browsers. There may or may not be similar functions on the mobile app.

Yahoo Mail Search Presets

Click the “Storage” icon at the lower left of the browser window to be taken to https://mail.yahoo.com/n/manage_storage. The preset search options include some common searches that may be a useful starting point to free up the greatest amount of storage space with the least effort:

Advanced Search

You can also enter specific parameters using the Advanced Search options:

This enables you to find emails within a certain date range, emails with attachments or photos, etc. Notice that after clicking on options in the Advanced Search, you’ll see the “command line equivalents” in the search bar. For example:

• Emails containing media: containattachmenttypes:image,video,audio
• Emails containing documents: containattachmenttypes:document
• Emails with attachments older than 10 years: before:"yyyy-mm-dd" (where yyyy-mm-dd is 10 years ago)

You can also mix and match criteria to refine your search.

Delete Emails from a Sender

You’ve likely subscribed to emails from multiple companies and may have accumulated years’ worth of archived messages. Think about the companies that have sent you the most emails and the ones with the most/largest embedded graphics, as deleting them will free up space. To do this, open one of the emails and find the sender’s domain. For example, I’ve subscribed to Costco emails for years and have simply archived them without deleting them, but now it’s time to delete them for good. Mousing over the “Costco Wholesale” sender name reveals the sender’s email address as costco@digital.costco.com.

Use that address to search for the sender in the search bar. Note that searching for just the domain (@digital.costco.com) could potentially capture more emails than the full address (costco@digital.costco.com) because sometimes companies use different sender addresses on the same domain. From there, you will be presented with the first 25 messages. When you click the checkbox to select all 25 messages, you will be presented with an option to select all messages that meet your criteria (truly a “select all” option), after which you can delete all those messages.

Conclusions

As an individual user who wants a mail service to send and receive personal emails, if you want to stay on the free tier for Yahoo Mail, it is simple in most cases to perform routine maintenance on your emails to stay under the new quota. However, it does require a small amount of effort and a plan to reduce clutter. I hope you find these recommendations to be helpful, and if you have any other tips for efficiently reclaiming storage space, leave a comment below.