Lost yahoo inbox from POP forwarding to mail

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Hi

my yahoo account is currently set up to do pop forwarding to my imac mail account. Not quite sure how it's happened, but my yahoo inbox is suddenly showing as empty whilst it is showing normally (and full of all my emails) in the imac mail window.

Does anyone know how I could retrieve the inbox in my actual yahoo account?

Any help would be v v v appreciated!

Cheers

Jack
 
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Well, the problem may be in Mail's preferences. go to Mail-Preferences, and click advanced. From there you can have Mail delete messages from your Yahoo mailbox every day, week, etc, or you can delete them manually. Or not at all. I hope this helps!
 
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Well, the problem may be in Mail's preferences. go to Mail-Preferences, and click advanced. From there you can have Mail delete messages from your Yahoo mailbox every day, week, etc, or you can delete them manually. Or not at all. I hope this helps!

I had the same problem.

Some crazy guy at Apple made the default preference in Mail that everything from the mail.yahoo.com server should be deleted 7 days after it is loaded into Mail.App.

What were they thinking!?!?! I used to have 7000 messages on the Yahoo server, now they're only on my laptop! I called Yahoo (I have an account with them) and they said there is no way to restore this.
 

dtravis7


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That is not Apples fault at all. Most email clients have a default setting. It's the users responsibility to check the configuration.

For the record I do not remember any version of OSX Mail set to default zap messages off the server, but with every email client I always check that setting before I check messages on the server the first time.
 
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That's what POP does. From the RFC for POP3,

POP3 is not intended to provide extensive manipulation operations of mail on the server; normally, mail is downloaded and then deleted.
(Emphasis added.)

It goes on to suggest that users who do want to keep mail on the server use the IMAP protocol. Which Mail also supports. (IMAP accounts do not normally delete mail except when requested by the user.)
 

dtravis7


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How come then none of my email clients over the last 15 years have ever deleted mail off the server all running POP3.

Only mail server I use that provides IMAP is Google Mail. I have never lost one message off a server with POP3.
 
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They go into that in the RFC. Basically, the idea was

1. Mail is delivered to the server.
2. You check your mail. All your mail is downloaded to your client
3. Once the download completes, the mail is immediately deleted. The only copy left is on your computer.

The original POP standard is RFC-918. See "The Normal Scenario," a couple of pages in.

In this early version, there is no delete operation. Deleting is part of receiving! Support for receiving without deleting was only added later.

This worked fine when most people only had one computer. You'd go into work, download all of your email onto your (one and only) computer throughout the day, deleting it from the server as you went along. You didn't expect to get your email on your home computer, your laptop at Starbucks, your work computer, and your cell phone. Note the date on that RFC: 1984.

There's a reason they called it the "Post Office Protocol." The model was a rural post office, where people would come in once a day, shoot the breeze with the mailperson, collect their mail, and take it all home with them. (I know people who actually still do this.)

If you read through the later versions, (The latest is the shiny, new RFC-1939, from 1996) people had deviated from the old model and were configuring their clients to not immediately delete mail; as mentioned above, it suggests that such situations are better suited to IMAP.

...users and vendors of POP3 clients have discovered that the combination of using the UIDL command and not issuing the DELE command can provide a weak version of the "maildrop as semi-permanent repository" functionality normally associated with IMAP....

By now, people have pretty much exclusively migrated to the "maildrop as a permanent repository" model, so much so that newcomers think that deleting old mail from the server is "crazy."
 

dtravis7


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Ok, that all makes sense.

I was half asleep when I read your first post. :D

Starting with Eudora which was the first real Email client I ever used, I always told it to leave it on the server and I dealt with it myself later. The one email client that had no switch to leave it on the server was BeMail in BeOS. I had at the time never ran into a client like it and was so mad when all my messages that were not downloaded to my other computers were gone forever! :D

Made me hate BeMail! :D

With larger and larger servers these days, people keep it all on the server but someday it will eventually hit whatever limit your ISP or mail provider gives you and have to be zapped.
 
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"you can have Mail delete messages from your Yahoo mailbox every day, week, etc, or you can delete them manually."

Does that mean emails deleted from my yahoo mailbox (in my "regular" yahoo.com email) will then be deleted from my yahoo acct in mail.app? (currently, there's email in my yahoo acct in mail.app that I have deleted from mail.yahoo.com).
 
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"you can have Mail delete messages from your Yahoo mailbox every day, week, etc, or you can delete them manually."

Does that mean emails deleted from my yahoo mailbox (in my "regular" yahoo.com email) will then be deleted from my yahoo acct in mail.app? (currently, there's email in my yahoo acct in mail.app that I have deleted from mail.yahoo.com).

I second this question.

Does anyone have an answer to it? I'm already tired of deleting emails in both inboxes. Thanks!
 

dtravis7


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Is your Yahoo email a Free account or a Pay one? If free, No POP support so no email client will work with it. If Pay then yes if you set up your yahoo email in Main and use it to check your mail.
 
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I use the Pay email-Yahoo Plus. I have been able to set it up successfully, but even after I hit "Get mail" or when it syncs naturally, it doesn't delete email that's in the iMail Yahoo inbox, even if it's no longer in my web based inbox. Just have to do it manually, but kind of frustrating that I have to delete it twice.
 

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