An easy way to delete old Yahoo emails and free up storage

This quick and simple way to delete messages with attachments or photos will make sure you stay within Yahoo’s new storage limits...for the rest of your life.

By John Pint

John Pint attacked by 11,000 email attachments

At the end of July, 2025, it began to appear, a scary message from Yahoo telling me I had exceeded my email storage limit and if I didn't reduce it, I would no longer be able to send and receive messages. This would cut off communication with hundreds of people my wife and I had met while “teaching our way around the world” in South Korea, Spain, France, Japan, England and Saudi Arabia

A quick search revealed that this little problem had been caused not by me but by Yahoo itself. For years they had been giving a terabyte of storage space to their non-paying customers, but now they announced that, effective August 27, 2025, they would cut this down to 20 gigabytes.  That is a 98% drop in storage space!

So, how many gigabytes was I using? I discovered I could see the amount by clicking on Settings and then on “More Settings.”

As soon as More Settings opened up, I found my storage information at the bottom left of the screen: I had used up 26.3 gigas…. so I needed to liberate at least 6.3 gigas, or else!

I spent the next two days surfing the web for ways to do this. Most sources basically told me I must search for pesky emails from specific individuals, vendors or organizations, and then delete them in batches of 25, first from my inbox and then from the trash.

I did this—again and again! Thousands of deletions, however, barely made a dent in my 26.3 gigas of old emails.

Now, I had been using Yahoo since the turn of the Millennium and I had acquired what seemed to me like a googol (in the original sense: 1 followed by 100 zeros) of messages, and erasing them selectively would probably take googols of days to accomplish.

Then I found it: the solution.

Next to the search bar at the top of the Yahoo page, there's an option for Advanced Search.

Click on these words and at the bottom of the Advanced Search choices you’ll see three boxes. Two grabbed my attention: Attachments and Photos.

Immediately I realized what was clogging up my inbox. It wasn't the huge number of messages I had sent and received, it was documents attached to those messages and photos inserted into them!

I checked the Attachments box, did the search and was first presented with emails containing attachments. When I checked the “Check all messages” box, words appeared at the top of the page asking me if I wanted to select the messages I could see on my screen or did I want to “select all of the 11,000 messages matching this search.”

Eleven thousand messages with eleven thousand attachments of who-knows-how many megabytes each!

So, I clicked on the words “select all of the 11,000 messages matching this search.”

Then I hit delete and sent them all to the trash, which was a bit of a mistake, because when I tried to empty the trash, a little circle of arrows started turning... and kept turning for hours. Ha, ha, I eventually concluded that Yahoo’s limit for trash deletion must be 10,000 items. I had to start all over and reduce my contribution to the trash can to 9,999 or less messages.

Once I was under 10,000, the program was able to empty the trash… and suddenly the size of my inbox shrank to a mere 3 GB—-I had done it!

I believe that occasional purging of messages with attachments and photos will keep your emails well within the storage limits of the popular email providers, no matter how many decades you've been at it.

Follow this procedure and at the end you will—like me—happily chortle:

Yahoo!

(In the original sense)