[TriLUG] Slightly OT: Popping Yahoo Mail

[Scott Chilcote via TriLUG]

Hi LUGgers,

Has anyone used POP with yahoo mail successfully?  I tried it with
several years worth of email yesterday, and the results are scrambled.

With Yahoo's current turmoil it seemed like a good idea to get a local
copy of all of the old email I have sitting around in my account.  I
configured thunderbird to pop it down, which was nicely automated. 
However, after the 5200 odd emails finished arriving I had a mess.

I haven't looked through all of it yet, but it looks like I only
received email up to early 2014.  That's when their mail server called
it a day.  Worse than that, the dates on the messages are out of whack. 
It's as if Yahoo's server's date was set to be sometime in April 2014,
so the most recent emails from that time are listed as being current. 
In the email headers the dates are correct, but in thunderbird's list
they are from today, yesterday, last week, and so forth.

I took another computer that has thunderbird installed and tried again. 
A couple of hours later, I have the identical result.  Yahoo's pop mail
service, apparently, is living around a year and a half in the past.

My mental flow chart then brought me to the little box that says "if I'm
having this weirdness, then someone (or most likely, many someones) on
the internet has probably had the same problem." 

So I fired up google.  Several minutes later I arrived at nowhere 
:-(    If other people are having this problem, then I'm not able to
find the right set of search terms to ferret it out.  Nearly every
search wraps me back to Yahoo's worthless online help pages. 

Any clues or suggestions? 

I haven't used IMAP very much, but it's available.  Is there a way to
use it in thunderbird to pull everything to a local folder?

Much thanks,

   Scott C.

-- 
Scott Chilcote
scottchilcote at ncrrbiz.com
Cary, NC USA