I use two web based email clients Yahoo and Hotmail both are full with
600 plus individual emails sent and inbox.  I'd like a no cost or low
cost way to simply archive all these emails to a file or folder on my
PC.  I do not want to spend all day cutting and pasting each email
into a document.  I do not want to pay for an upgrade and use a pop3
client.  There are very few attachments with these emails, I only
require the text so any loss of html formating is fine.  I only
require the sender name, date, subject and content.  I do not need to
reply to the emails or use them like emails.  I am only interested in
them as a historical record. The solution can be for either a windows
or linux based system.  Thank you for your time.

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 15 Jun 2004 12:44 PDT

As of today, the size of your Yahoo email account should have
increased substantially as they play catch-up with GMail.  I suppose
Hotmail may do likewise sometime soon.

If you still feel you need a solution, let us know and we'll look
around.  There are definitely some software programs out there that
will download web-based emails to your hard drive.

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Clarification of Question by enigmaga-ga on 15 Jun 2004 16:26 PDT

Ironic isn't it after posing the question my Yahoo account which was
at 94% used and nothing to delete now has 96% free space.  On the
other hand these increases in mailbox quotas just delay the inevitable
and make me less ruthless when it comes to deleting mail.  Plus using
these free email services provide few guarantees that my email is
safe.  While the emails have no financial worth to me they are of
sentimental value so the task of archiving them neatly remains.  That
said crythias-ga in his/her two comments has provided me with a method
to download and store my old emails.   It is not the simple solution i
was seeking but it looks like it will work.  I am new to this forum if
I try out crythias-ga solution and if it works (which looks likely)
should I accept his/her answer and let them claim the $30.

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 15 Jun 2004 16:44 PDT

crythias-ga, for all the good advice (s)he has offered, is not a
Google Answers Researcher (you can always tell the researchers,
because their names are in purple, and hyperlinked, as is mine,
above).

Anyone can sign onto the GA service and offer their comments, as did
crythias-ga.  If the advice works for you, then you got yourself a
freebie, and you should probably cancel your question.

But if you would still like a GA researcher to look into your quetion
and provide a formal answer (perhaps with other options not yet
considered), then just post a clarification here to let us know.

All the best,

pafalafa-ga (a Google Answers Researcher).

---

Clarification of Question by enigmaga-ga on 16 Jun 2004 04:10 PDT

Pafalafa-ga thanks for the clarification and thanks to the others for
their comments.  I've used crythias and m23wong's comments to download
and save the emails to csv files.  I guess I got freebie but that
leaves me with $30 to use on another question when the need arises and
after an excellent response on my first attempt I don't think that
will be long.

All the best

Enigma

You can try this (which will provide pop without paying)
http://www.jmasoftware.com/english/download/index.html (Web2POP)

The standard distribution is for Yahoo! and Hotmail, coincidentally.
It's a 30-day shareware.

Once inside your email program, you can export your emails however you
want. Of course, for the price of your question, you could have paid
for the upgrades of each for one month or trialed to do this. Somehow,
though, this method doesn't seem acceptable, and I'd love to see how
someone else will get you a non-pop3 (or imap) method to efficiently
do what you requested for 600+ emails.

For Hotmail, it is very easy to set up using Microsoft Outlook or
Outlook express. See one of the following links:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=287424
http://www.updatexp.com/19.html
http://help.msn.com/EN_US/data/hotmailv2_2.its51/$content$/CreateOE.htm

For Yahoo!, it's a little more complicated, but still free. Check this out:
http://yahoopops.sourceforge.net/index.php

Once you have your outlook / outlook express set up with both your
hotmail and yahoo accounts, create a new folder in your "Personal
Folders", and drag and drop all the email you want to archive to this
folder.

-M

Thank you both for your comments and the jma and yahoopops solutions
that I was unaware of.  I had considered POP3 and storing the emails
in a pst file but this is the least desired solution.  The emails form
a kind of diairy or blog and I've already enough emails in my main and
work accounts to last me a life time.  I was hoping for a solution
that stored the emails neatly in some type of text file, maybe a csv,
xml or html file.  I didn't want to be here in 30 years time when
outlook express and pst files are but a distant memory asking how can
I convert my emails to...

enigmaga-ga, 

Within Outlook you do have the ability to export any/all folders as
various formats, including tab delimited.

I'd strongly suggest that you create a new Profile/pst in Outlook to
temporarily handle *only* the messages you're downloading (even one
PST per webmail service) just so they don't interfere with your
existing email situation.

I'm not a Google Answers Researcher (my name doesn't have a link), so
I can't collect. :)