How to create filter in yahoo mail?

What is the best way to bulk manage Yahoo! Mail with over 150,000 messages spanning 10 years?

• I have the Mail Plus offering for which I pay about $20/year. Yahoo filter implementation is underwhelming to put it politely. You can create filters, but they apply to new messages only.  You can not create a new filter while viewing a message or inheriting message headers from it. Mail Search times out about 50% of the time, and with the paginated web interface it makes it near impossible to take bulk actions like moving search results into folders. I have tried the undocumented/unsupported IMAP interface with Thunderbird hoping I could use its filtering to clean up my mailbox but it always times out after downloading headers. (Understand that it is not a supported product) Any suggestions on how I can bulk move my mail into folders?As a side effect I would like to make a copy of my email as well. Is there a way to bulk import it into Gmail?

• Answer:

  Filtering your mail to easily see the messages you want is a common problem.  At Microsoft Outlook .com we've implemented a number of features to make this easier for users such as sweep, which allow a user to easily sweep all mail with certain characteristics to a folder.   Users can chose to keep only the last N from a specified sender (keep only the last 3 groupons), can sweep all but the last N days (move old newletters), etc.  We allow users filter and view and slice-and-dice newletters, from-contacts, shipping-notifications, emails with documents, email with photos, etc.   Yahoo just announced a new release which looks pretty slick (and quite familiar to an outlook user, I might add), so you may want to wait and see if they ship some of the features you're looking for.   But if you want a modern email system right now, with better anti-spam, better filtering, tight social network integration, you can easily import all of your mail into our service.  Sign-up for an account and you will be presented with options to POP Aggregate the email in.  It may take a few days to suck all the email over given how many you have.  You can continue to send-from and recieve to your Yahoo address as long as you keep paying them, but you'll probably want to eventually tell your contacts about your new address and cut the cord.