You're, what two days in? How much time have you saved by not deleting the cr@p? That's a ''lot ''of stuff to work through. Be patient, but TBH, email isn't good at sustained large data transfers. It is very much happier with a "bursty" little-but-often traffic pattern. I don't understand your "don't delete" philosophy. I get an awful lot of cruft which has, at best, zero value. You remind me of an argument that if you had an infinite number of monkeys each with its own typewriter, in time they would produce the complete works of Shakespeare. The trouble is they'd also produce an infinite number of near misses, and how would you know which was the correct one? Sometimes, often in fact, too much data is as bad as too little. And the monkeys would also produce every encyclopaedia ever produced, (and those yet to be written!) along with any number of near misses but with factual errors, So again, how could you know what to trust? I wouldn't worry about losing the service if Yahoo! were taken over. Takeovers and mergers are generally done so one business can acquire the assets of another, and as an email account user, you are part of those assets. You're a member of a user base to whom they can show adverts, and they need to keep you. ;-)