DreamHost threatening to delete 25 years of my email from their server tonight

[clay]

Ken Sp. wrote:
Could you set up a Gmail account, and have it go retrieve all of your messages for you?

Yup, that's one option that should work. There are also programs that will let you take an offline backup of your email and keep it in a format that could be brought back into the email account at some point. I don't have any recommendations as I've never needed this.