Yahoo Mail’s Surprise Storage Slash: Why Your Deleted Emails Aren’t Freeing Up Space
If you’ve logged into your Yahoo Mail recently and noticed you’re suddenly bumping up against a storage limit, you’re not alone. In a quiet yet dramatic move, Yahoo reduced its email storage quota from a generous 1TB to just 20GB, sending shockwaves through longtime users.
Naturally, thousands of users have been scrambling to delete old messages, photos, and attachments to make space. But here’s the catch: even after deleting tens of thousands of emails, many are seeing no change in storage usage.
So what gives?
First, yes, Yahoo pulled the rug
Let’s not sugarcoat it. Yahoo’s decision to slash storage from 1TB to 20GB, without fanfare or much warning, feels like a classic “rug pull.” Many users had years’ worth of correspondence, documents, and media backed up under the assumption that 1TB meant freedom to archive.
Suddenly, the new limit is forcing some serious inbox spring cleaning. But if you’re among those who already tried a mass delete and your storage bar isn’t budging, you’re not crazy. There’s a very Yahoo reason for this.
Deleting Emails Doesn’t Instantly Free Up Space
Here’s the frustrating reality: when you delete an email in Yahoo Mail, it doesn’t truly vanish. Instead, it goes into the Trash folder, where it sits like a ghost, still haunting your storage total. Until you empty your Trash, Yahoo still counts those emails toward your 20GB cap.
Even worse? Some users have found that clicking the trash can icon doesn’t always delete everything.
“I deleted almost 40,000 emails, but my storage didn’t change at all,” said one confused user.
Another chimed in, “The trash icon was not deleting everything. I had to go in and manually select and delete all items in the Trash folder.”
That’s right. Sometimes, Yahoo’s trash-clearing tool only gets part of the job done.
💡 Here’s How to Actually Free Up Space
To make real progress toward shrinking your Yahoo Mail storage:
- Delete Unwanted Emails
Start by selecting large batches of old or unneeded emails from your Inbox, Sent, and other folders. Look for emails with attachments, those eat up the most space. - Go to the Trash Folder
This is where most people stop. Don’t. - Manually Clear the Trash
- Navigate to the Trash folder on the left sidebar.
- Click “Select All” at the top of the list.
- If more messages are present (Yahoo only loads a chunk at a time), scroll and click “Select all conversations” that appear in the trash.
- Hit “Delete” to permanently remove them.
- Confirm if prompted.
- Double-check Other Folders
Don’t forget the Spam folder or custom folders where old emails might be lurking. - Wait a Bit
Storage stats may not update immediately. Give Yahoo some time to reflect the changes, typically within a few minutes to an hour.
Pro Tips for the Storage-Panicked
- Sort by size: Use filters to find the biggest email culprits.
- Attachments = Space hogs: Consider downloading and deleting messages with large files.
- Use an email client like Thunderbird or Outlook if you want more control over bulk deletions.
Final Thoughts
Yahoo Mail’s storage reduction feels like a major step backward, and for many, a motivation to migrate to Gmail or ProtonMail. But if you’re sticking with Yahoo, understanding the quirky mechanics of deleting emails and clearing Trash can help you claw back precious space.
Just remember: “Delete” doesn’t mean “gone” until it’s out of the Trash. So empty that bin like you mean it.
Got any Yahoo horror stories or clever cleanup tricks? Drop them in the comments, because we’re all in this digital purge together.
Yahoo still says that I have over 7 million messages in Spam and over 106000 in trash even though I have deleted all the messages in both spam and trash and it shows 0 messages in both folders on 2 different computers and browsers. How can I get this fixed? No wonder they are saying I have exceeded my storage limit! They have not adjusted their count to reflect the deletion of all the messages.
VERY frustrating, but this is not working. I have *thousands* of emails in trash, and it just sits at 0 percent and won’t delete. ???
In Trash, when I clicked on the little square in the upper left, that selects 100 emails.
BUT when I then used the scroller on the right ride of the emails and scrolled down, it automatically batched a lot of other emails in groups of 100, and then I could delete way more than 100. I could keep scrolling down and delete 500, 800, 1100, etc emails at one time.
I have 3 yahoo emails & mine warned me that I was 4.98 GB over the new limit so I started deleting old emails from the in & sent folders & lastly from the trash box that they were transferred to — you have to do 100 at a time because the delete all does not work! I did all this & now when I check my storage — it is now down to 975.4 it says but says the same thing for all 3 email accounts, so I know this is not correct!
One of my email accounts that I hardly ever use even has just over 15,000 unread messages! I am no longer getting a warning on my desktop that I am over usage limits but my Android Phone which I only use for 2 accounts (not the one with 15,000 unread emails) still keeps giving me the same “Your mailbox is full” you need to free up 4.98GB on both emails! I can dismiss the warning but it comes back every time I check my email.
This looks like this is just a way to get people to subscribe to Yahoo’s paid email by tricking them into thinking they are out of room even when you get way under their limit. Yahoo email has got poorer & poorer IMO & now just plain bad!
I’ve moved 100,000+ emails to the trash. When I select them all and “delete” them, they don’t go away. Anyone else have this issue? Surely, I don’t have to hand select them 1,000 at a time do I? Will they automatically be gone after 7 days? This is all ridiculous.
“Stupid Smart People” strike again and ruin an entire company. The Greed is immeasurable to throttle the Company to sell storage space, they tried that before it failed and the person who proposed they do it was fired. You’d figure the forcing of Adds was enough but someone wanted more.
I deleted 15,000 email then 10 K more – manually deleting 100 at a time (as the Batch delete didn’t work) finally cleared the Trash box.
Looked the next day (today) and all 25,000 emails were back in the Trash.
Looks like I will have to Migrate all my accounts to another Platform.
Add this to the Greed – I tried to contact Customer support but they want to make you pay for that – I’m not going to pay for support for a problem they created.
Guess they wanted to find out How to lose a Customer that has been with the Company since they began. Over 3 decades.
I manually deleted over 15,000 emails then another nearly 10,000. Looked empty – the next day nearly 25,000 emails were in my trash folder – deleted a few times and still there. Looks like I will be forced by Yahoo to Migrate all my accounts to another Email service. Sometimes there is a “Stupid Smart Person” who thinks they will make money but their actions actually destroy the entire company. Whoever decided to kill Yahoo with this money making scheme should be fired.
I Also tried to reach out to Customer support but that’s only a paid service, I won’t pay for something they created. You’d have thought forcing adds on people was enough however they FAFO- that Greedy people destroy good companies once again.
I don’t see any comments here. Am I the only one that got this notification yesterday? I have nearly 30 GB.
Just deleted 80K emails from years and years of not cleaning my inbox. They are just sitting in the Trash and not budging, despite manually emptying the trash folder. What gives??
I attempted to delete 46,000 unread messages. It deleted the 1st 10000 and stopped. When I then tried to empty the trash folder, the app stuck with a spinning circle and “Deleting all messages in Trash — 0%”