Att classic mail

I feel like I'm missing something here. Over a  year ago I, of my own volition, switched to the new format (they did not switch me), and you can easily switch back and forth all day, every day. I do it often in the course of experimenting. ATT has not forced me back to "classic", either. Why would they? They've been touting the bejesus out of the new format to get us to move over, I assume so they shut down the old one sooner or later. 

One thing I don't like, and read  it's a done deal, with the new format you can not set one of 2 or more email account to "store and forward" email to another, be it a secondary ATT email or gmail or hotmail or whatever. My original, very first account of 25+ yrs ago  became corrupted and ATT would not fix it, so I just left it and created a new email addr, but in order not to have to tell anyone, I just told my old acct to forward to my new acct, so it does not matter which email people use for me. This feature is allegedly going away, unless they grandfather it. You can not enable it or look at it without toggling back to "classic" to check settings since the new format has no such setting.

For the person worrying about complexity rocking the boat so he/she does not want to change, I don't see any added complexity or big new feature-set to learn. It's not a big deal. It's mainly just cosmetics or packaging. The item just described is the only difference I have found. You will not lose anything, all folders remain intact, all emails stay where they are, life goes on  without a wrinkle, except for forwarding email to other accounts. So far, no change to the email forwarding I mentioned, still works fine and it's been in place for a year.

The other thing I don't get is this is not new a new thing, at least not in California with an AT&T pacbell.net domain. This new format  has been out and stable (for me) for over a year. It's currently late Feb of 2019.

Thank you! much of what you say is my understanding from either reading or experimentation. On the store and forwarding, I'm encouraged to hear they will retain that for an ATT to ATT account, the way I use it. I also observed you could only go in and fiddle with it by toggling back to "classic" mail as I could find no settings for it in the new format. I will take another look after  your comments.

For reasons unknown, my original acct going back maybe 20+ yrs to pacbell.net days in NorCal, my folder structure became badly messed with deep nesting and empty folders x a huge number too large for me to manually delete/rename or whatever without spending days at the keyboard. Calling ATT was a fail as they declined to fix it because "we might delete something important". So, my only option was to walk away from the account, create a new one (empty inbox of course) then forward so people could still use my old (and new too) email address. Over a year later, this continues to work just fine. And, if I need an old email from a year ago, I just go into that old acct. with yahoo webmail (normally use eMClient).

Now, just to ensure I am on the same page, my "classic" or "basic" version looks really, really basic and I see nothing full featured about it. I'll try to insert/attach a screen shot below. Is this what you're talking about?

Here's a bigger version. You can see my messed up folder situation along the left margin. All folders with the same name and most empty. But, the mass delete does not work, so to clean that up, I'd have  had to touch each folder one at a time times well over a hundred. I had more important work to do watching paint dry, so abandoned the account and started over.

While I have  your attention (ACE-expert) is there a setting in the classic/basic version to turn on html mode, or is it permanently locked in "text only" mode? I can not find a setting.

I ask because a friend using that email, when he does a reply to my html based email, since it can not process/recognize html code, it shows that raw code just above my text in the reply. I'm trying to get him to move to the new version. This is a new thing that started a month or so ago and I'm baffled why it started just now since I don't think either of us changed anything.

Thanks for your help on this forum!

@ejp_1 

Thank you! much of what you say is my understanding from either reading or experimentation. On the store and forwarding, I'm encouraged to hear they will retain that for an ATT to ATT account, the way I use it. I also observed you could only go in and fiddle with it by toggling back to "classic" mail as I could find no settings for it in the new format. I will take another look after  your comments.

Classic's POP&Forwarding gives you the choice of "Store and Forward" or "Store and Forward and make as read".  The "new" layout forwarding doesn't give you any choice, it's always "store and forward".   I haven't confirmed whether the "store and forward and mark as read" if selected in classic actually works.  Normally I would say it should work, but, hey, this is yahoo we're talking about!

Now, just to ensure I am on the same page, my "classic" or "basic" version looks really, really basic and I see nothing full featured about it. I'll try to insert/attach a screen shot below. Is this what you're talking about?

That's classic. (I could see the first one just fine, mouse over it in the post and you will see a magnifying glass)

While I have  your attention (ACE-expert) is there a setting in the classic/basic version to turn on html mode, or is it permanently locked in "text only" mode? I can not find a setting.

There's no text vs. html settings in the webmail because it generally is not needed.  The actual full email message usually contains text or html or both and there's info in the actual message to indicate which.  If you are not familiar with what a actual raw email message looks like, open one of your emails in the webmail, and since you are in classic, you should see "Raw message" and "Printable view" above the upper right of the mail body.  Click "raw message" to see what the actual email looks like, i.e., a lot more than what you normally see.  At any rate in there there's info controlling how to present the body of an email.  I don't want to go deeper into this since it's getting off topic.  It's just a FYI.

I ask because a friend using that email, when he does a reply to my html based email, since it can not process/recognize html code, it shows that raw code just above my text in the reply. I'm trying to get him to move to the new version. This is a new thing that started a month or so ago and I'm baffled why it started just now since I don't think either of us changed anything.

I am not sure what's going on there but it sounds like a problem on the sending side. Could it be something is not supported in the classic email when interpreting the actual email headers and it just reverts to that behavior?  Possible I guess.  Look at the message in the "new" layout to see how it behaves there.

At any rate, bottom line is though you have no control over the way an incoming email is presented.