How to Archive Yahoo Mail to Organize Your Mailbox

Yahoo Mail Archiving Is an Essential Practice

When you think about it, it’s almost astonishing how poorly the average Yahoo user manages their inboxes.

If people managed physical mail the same way, every person would have a huge pile of letters, postcards, newsletters, and all kinds of other mail piled up on the floor. Finding a specific mail would be a nightmare, and important letters could easily end up at the bottom of the pile, never to be seen again.

The fact that most email users let their digital mail pile up the same way is even more shocking considering that the email service provider makes it easy for users to archive emails.

What is Archive in Yahoo Mail, you wonder?

The Yahoo Mail archive feature is sort of like that special drawer many people have at home to store important documents. In our case, it is a safekeeping folder to store email messages instead of deleting them permanently. When you archive an email message in Yahoo, the message and all of its attachments are moved to the Archive folder, where they stay until you need to access them in the future via a quick and easy search.

For instance, you can archive email receipts and invoices for future reference while keeping your inbox clean, or travel confirmations. With 1TB of free storage provided to each user, you doubtfully will run out of space in your Yahoo Mail account soon, so archiving instead of deleting emails is a perfect solution to make sure you could still access important emails in the future.

Basically, by archiving all important messages, you can:

• Keep your Inbox organized by preventing it from serving two purposes at once—being a destination for new email messages and a place where old messages are stored at the same time.
• You can then easily implement Inbox Zero, which is a popular email management approach aimed at keeping the inbox empty or almost empty at all times.

Keep reading to learn more about archiving emails in Yahoo manually. Or get to the part about auto-archiving Yahoo emails instead.

How to Archive Yahoo Mail on Desktop

Yahoo currently maintains two separate versions of its web interface, which most desktop users rely on when accessing their inboxes.

Using the default interface:

1. Go to: https://mail.yahoo.com/
2. Log in with your email address and password.
3. Click the checkbox next to the message you want to be archived. You can select multiple messages at the same time.
4. Click the Archive button - - in the toolbar.
5. The selected messages will be moved to the archive folder.

To unarchive email messages (move them back to the Inbox folder) you need:

1. Select the Archive folder from the left pane.
2. Mark the messages you want to restore.
3. Click the Restore to Inbox button.

Since most modern email services have a similar user interface, the same steps also roughly correspond to how to archive in Outlook.

Using the basic Mail interface:

1. Go to: https://mail.yahoo.com/
2. Log in with your email address and password.
3. Click the Settings button and choose More Settings.
4. Click Switch to basic Mail.
5. Click the checkbox next to the message you want to be archived. You can select multiple messages at the same time.
6. Click the Actions dropdown menu and select the Archive option under Move to.
7. Click Apply.
8. The selected messages will be moved to the archive folder.

To restore them back to the Inbox folder, you need:

1. Select the Yahoo Mail Archive folder from the left pane.
2. Mark the messages you want to restore.
3. Click the Actions dropdown menu, and select the Inbox option under Move to.

How to Archive Yahoo Emails on Mobile

The Yahoo mobile app is available on Android and iOS, and you can use it to conveniently archive Yahoo Mail messages on the go. Here’s how:

1. Launch the app on your Android or iOS device.
2. Open the message you want to be archived.
3. Select the Archive option: iOS - - or - - Android.

To unarchive a message using the mobile app, all you need to do is move it back to your Inbox folder.

1. Click the Inbox icon at the bottom
2. Select the Archive option.
3. Select the messages you want to restore and click Restore to Inbox - - .

We recommend:

Since your Android or iOS smartphone is likely with you almost all the time, we recommend you take advantage of it and organize your messages as soon as they arrive. The longer you let them sit in your inbox, the higher the chance of you forgetting about them becomes.

It’s also worth noting that the Yahoo app can display inboxes from other email service providers, providing another way how to find archived emails in Gmail, Outlook, or AOL, just to name three major providers.

How to Archive Yahoo Mail to Hard Drive

The Yahoo Mail Archiver feature is great for separating important messages from junk and various low-value notifications, but your emails still technically remain in the same location—on Yahoo’s servers. Considering the company’s history of data breaches and cybersecurity incidents in general, it’s a good idea to archive Yahoo Mail to a hard drive as well.

There are various email archiving solutions from third-party software developers that make this easy, such as the SysTools Yahoo! mail backup utility for Windows and Mac:

1. Download and install the SysTools Yahoo! mail backup utility.
2. Launch the utility and log in with your username and password.
3. Go to the Backup tab and select the desired backup format.
4. Select the destination where you want to store your messages.
5. Click the Apply Filter button and select which categories of email messages you want to download.
6. Click Start to begin.

You can also download email messages using a mail client with POP support, such as Microsoft Outlook, but the process is considerably more complicated.

How to Auto Archive Emails in Yahoo Mail

Soon after you start archiving Yahoo Mail messages, you’ll notice that there are several types of messages, such as finance emails and digital invoices for your online purchases, that you’re archiving over and over again. Wouldn’t it be great to Yahoo Mail auto archive these emails? It would.

Unfortunately, Yahoo couldn't archive your emails automatically. However, you can select the mail and send them to the Archive folder by creating Yahoo filter rules.

Or, you can try Clean Email to make it faster and get all other perks.