Old Email Retrieval I can't find any email prior to 2006. I have been locked out of this account more times than I can count over the years

Let's get you the correct information on restoring those emails, @Tami616181362! 

When it comes to restoring emails, if they weren't present as of seven days ago then our email restoral process won't work. We do recommend using Currently to check if the emails appear there. You can try using a third party email client such as Outlook to set up your email using IMAP setting to sync your email.

If the steps above don't work, then we are unable to recover those emails.

Let us know the results of these steps!

CalebP, AT&T Community Specialist 

Aminah from ATT stayed previously that the emails can be restored.  They were removed by ATT - not by myself.

I need to know why everything prior to 2006 is not recoverable and if there is a possibility of recovery as I'm not clear on your previous response.

I'm confused as to what event "7 days ago" is referring to.  What action was taken 7 days ago?

I don't want a new email address and don't see the benefit of creating a new acct such as outlook and how syncing the accounts would restore the emails prior to 2006.

Please provide more detailed explanation.  

Hi there, Tami616181362. We understand that you have lost emails dating back from 2006. Let's explain the recover and the options that we have presented in detail. 

According to this support article, we are only allowed to recover email for the past 7 days. Here is the reason why. There is a storage limit of 1 TB in the AT&T/Yahoo inbox. Once that storage limit has been reached, the inbox itself will start purging the older emails to make room for newer emails. 

The 7 days, means that a record is held for a period of 7 days. Once that time is past the email itself is not able to be recovered., because the record is removed from the server. 

 Caleb from @ATTHelp, talked about Outlook. He was not talking about outlook.com, the email address, he was talking about Microsoft Outlook, the program. What the program does, it creates a local folder on your computer, that will download all emails from the AT&T/Yahoo email server, so that your emails will be held locally and not on the web. That way your emails will be kept until you manually delete them or purge the email yourself. 

He has provided the settings to help you set up Microsoft Outlook, so you can have a bigger space to hold more emails, then what the AT&T/Yahoo inbox will allow. 

We do hope that this has shed some light on what is going on and why we have provided the options the way that we did. 

If there is anything else that we can do for you, please reach out to us again. 

Thanks for posting on the AT&T Community Forums. 

Matthew, AT&T Community Specialist

Ok - didn't realize that there was a relationship between ATT Yahoo and Microsoft Outlook.  I will try setting that up and respond.  Thank you!!