How to get your Yahoo emails out without giving them to NSA

Let me apologize for taking until today to write this.

Today is the day Yahoo tries to make you switch to their new Email software.

“Beginning July 9, 2013, you can only access your Yahoo! Mail if you switch to a new version.”

What Yahoo doesn’t tell you out loud is that to use your Yahoo! Mail after July 8, 2013, you have to agree to a NEW policy that violates your privacy even more than the old one.

This new policy gives Yahoo the right to scan ALL your emails for who, when and what you have communicated about.

Yahoo believes they can then can use your data any way they want !

They do explain that they will use it for business purposes. What Yahoo doesn’t tell you is that they believe they then have your consent to give your emails to NSA too.

Yahoo Email – NOT !

That is not “Informed Consent” and violates your Privacy rights.

Outrageously, Yahoo has actually been giving your data to the NSA / CIA / FBI / DoD etc. since 2008 but “accidentally” forgetting to let you know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#Edward_Snowden

They just didn’t bother to ask you for it. Oops.

That is still not “Informed Consent.”

Here’s how to dodge that Privacy Violation bullet – without agreeing to the new service.

Well, sort of. Since NSA already has your older emails, what it really does is give you stronger protection that Yahoo and NSA both may not legally read, scan or use your Yahoo emails.

But make darn sure you DO NOT SIGN INTO Yahoo after July 8, 2013 or you will have agreed to this new policy ! Here’s how to get all your emails out without using Yahoo’s email software – meaning you are doing an end run around signing their new Privacy Violation policy.

1. Download “Mailstore” a PC program, free for non-commercial use.

As far as I can determine on short notice, Mailstore is good software and the only email backup software that works on IMAP accounts, and works well once you have it set up correctly.

(“Free” Yahoo email accounts use IMAP protocol. Yahoo only gives you the easier to use POP3 ability with the paid “Plus” subscription. and Sorry, the YPOPS program does not work with free Yahoo accounts.)

Mailstore is only free if you use it for personal purposes. If your Yahoo account is used for Business – you need to pay for a license.

2. Set MailStore up.

Your email address and password are obvious.

The non-obvious items are —

“Server” = “imap.mail.yahoo.com”

“Access Via” = IMAP-SSL
(“IMAP” alone wll not work)

That should get it running.

3. To download all your emails – Double click on your email address in MailStore’s “Archive” section. (You can limit which Yahoo folders are backed up to your computer with a right click, but to just get all your emails out as fast as possible use the default settings.)

When I first tested it on a throwaway email address, MailStore didn’t get all emails in the first run. (It got almost all other emails, but totally missed my Inbox ! MailStore explains that Yahoo does random disconnects to discourage exactly what you are trying to do here.)
So you definitely need to be attentive to an error message saying it stopped before completion.

Subsequent runs only take a fraction of the time as Mailstore is smart enough not to re-download emails it already has. You will need to keep trying until it does not give you an error message.

4. You can now erase all your old emails with a right click on the “Email Archive”, then “Properties” and then choosing to adjust the “Delete” section on the second page of IMAP choices.

Then download any new incoming emails.

Now, after all your emails are deleted, you may delete your Yahoo account – and feel a bit more secure.

(Plus if there is ever a Class-action lawsuit against Yahoo for giving your emails to the NSA – you could claim some of those damage funds.)

Since Mailstore is only an email Backup program, you can not send emails out with it. So you will then need to get a new (Non-Yahoo) email system to send emails. MailStore will sort of pass email data to another outgoing email program so you can use an alternative to Yahoo.

Since NSA is vacuuming up everything that goes across the web and permanently keeping encrypted emails, your choice of an email system should be done carefully.

When you find one you like, MailStore can export your old emails into common email file formats that can be read by most modern email systems.

Once you have your data securely in MailStore, you can read and search your emails Far faster and easier than using Yahoo.