Yahoo! Groups, once upon a time a hub to many online communities, was shut down in 2020. Yahoo! Groups used to host mailing lists going as far back as 1997, and perhaps you may have once been a part of it yourself. Users were offered a Get Your Data tool to download their messages and other data, prior to the shutdown, but many people were unable to respond on short notice.
Thankfully, owing to the efforts of the Save Yahoo Groups Project and Archive Team the data of many groups has been preserved. If you missed out on the GYD tool, you might still be able to retrieve your groups’ data by following the steps below.
To begin, can you remember your group’s name? If yes, the following steps will go by a lot faster; but if not, you might want to make a list of potential names to go by. Was the name of your group Fireflylovers, or Firefliers, or LoversofFF? Write down all likely candidates.
For demonstration’s sake let’s search for data on NFforKids, a non-fiction writing group.
Let’s perform a metadata search, to see when NFforKids was started. Head over to the Yahoo Groups Metadata Collection page on the Internet Archive. Ignoring the no preview warning, either click on Show all files or scroll down until you see DOWNLOAD OPTIONS on the right side of the page.
Click on COMMA-SEPARATED VALUES, to reveal a list of files. Since NFforKids starts with an N, if it does exist, it will be indexed under master_N.csv. Download this CSV file to your device.
You can now open this CSV file using Excel or another spreadsheet program. Search for NFforKids to find the corresponding information row. What do you know? NFforKids was started on 11 June 2000. You can scroll accross this row to find the group’s primary language, the category of the group, if the group was public or not, and more!
If you weren’t able to find metadata on your group, it’s time to pull up that list I told you to make above. Fall back to the other candidates and try another name. If the first letter (or two) of this second name is different, you will need to download the corresponding CSV file before resuming your search.
Please note that while the Yahoo! Groups collections on the Internet Archive are thorough, they are NOT exhaustive. It is entirely possible that data on your group might have been missed. That being said the metadata collection sports a whopping 1.1 million groups. Even if you weren’t able to find your group in the first round, it is very likely that you may have misremembered the name, so keep on trying!
Once you have confirmed the name of your group, and that it has been catalogued in the Metadata Collection, you can then download the corresponding TAR file, which contains even more details. Again, if we’re looking for a group called NFforKids we’ll be looking for the first two letters from the list. That’s NF.tar for NFforKids.
If you’re on Mac or Linux, you should be able to open this .tar file to reveal a folder titled media. If you’re on Windows, you can use 7-zip to open it. This TAR file contains the same information as the CSV, plus additional details. Did the group have spam filtering, was media sharing allowed or was the group text-only? You might even find the URL for group images, although unfortunately most of those links are now dead.
Stats are fine and dandy, but what about messages or activity? If your group was restricted, tough luck, you’ll need to find a member who made a GYD copy before the shutdown. This is where our luck with NFforKids has run out, seeing as chats of the group were not public. For the final step, let’s switch to a public group whose history is visible. We’ll go with nfwritersontheirwayup. Messages in this group were visible to all subscribers, so archivists were able to grab its contents.
Raw data collections are stored in assorted, non-alphabetic, batches. To see if a group has its raw data available on the Internet Archive, simply query subject:"yahoo groups" nfwritersontheirwayup. If you get any results, your group’s raw data is most likely located here. You can double check the item description to be sure that nfwritersontheirwayup is indeed included in the batch.
Pop open the WEB ARCHIVE GZ download option from the left side of the page. Scroll down until you see nfwritersontheirwayup.bcqkJvN.warc.gz and proceed to download. To unpack this gzip you can use thegzip -d nfwritersontheirwayup.bcqkJvN.warc.gz command on Unix systems or good old 7-zip on Windows.
Last but not least, you’ll need a WARC viewer. If this is your first time with WARCs replayweb.page is very straightforward and runs right out of your browser. Simply upload the WARC contents of the group and voila, you can now navigate through the group’s chat logs.
Recovering your Yahoo! Groups from yesteryear is as simple as that. Got any questions? Or perhaps you have made some worthwhile discoveries while group hunting. Comment below!
Here’s to you, Jimmy; hoping that you and the other members of `nfwritersontheirwayup` cross paths again, someday, somewhere…
Hi themadprogramer,
Thank you so much for this post. Quick query: If I get to the part of your post where you say:
“Raw data collections are stored in assorted, non-alphabetic, batches. To see if a group has its raw data available on the Internet Archive, simply query:”
… and no result appears ~ is there a workaround, or someone to contact to see when the OPEN group I have found (using the previous parts of your blog) posts might be uploaded again?
Thank you so much.
Simon
I wish that this was simpler. I am lost, thus far.
I hear the Yahoo Geddan folks are working on something like a search tool, but that’s still early in development 🙁
I’m a code programmer let me know if I can help by the way your explain was hard to follow for me.
That would be awesome, but so far have not heard anything. Thanks. Would love seeing the yahoo groups return even if we can’t post but can read.
That would be great even if just to read.
Awesome.
this makes no sense!
Hi dear Jimmy, thank you sooooo much for your explanation. I’ve recovered the messages of a beloved and deeply missed Yahoo Group, it was almost instantly using only my smartphone! God bless you!!!
The instructions skip steps between downloading the csv file for the right starting letter (I’ve done that, and found the name of the group in the CVS file) and determining that that group was archived and downloading the tar file. There’s a huge disconnect there. I’m staring at the line in the csv file that has the name of my group, and I can’t figure out from the instructions what to look at next or what my next move is.
I tried to view my old TYPEWRITERS group. I found the correct web archive GZ, including many Yahoo Groups. Than I opened the WARC at the replayweb-page. But I see only the first records of other groups in the same batch. It doesn’t look like a webpage either. How can I read the TYPEWRITER group mails from there? Thanks!
Frank did you figure out how to decipher the WARC data ? I am at that point now and no way to search for the data but just open all the url messages on-by-one and try to interpret the json language. Any help would be appreciated.
Sorry to say I found the instructions very difficult to follow, and even after I more or less figured them out, still couldn’t understand how to recover anything. I always told myself I wouldn’t do Facebook, but at least there are still chat groups there, so maybe some of my old groupmates have joined them.
I found the instructions very difficult to understand as well
I also could not understand how to accomplish a recovery from these instructions. I am a professional content editor and would be happy to devote some time to this effort. Clarity is my specialty: writing instruction manuals. In any case the first step here is to clearly tell the reader to what address must they go to start their search. (Notice I wrote “their” instead of “there” which indicates I know how to write.)
Hi. It’s a verbose process unfortunately. The team behind the archive is working on making a better index/searching system, but until then it’s quite a manually involved process.
At the very least, we do want to make a video tutorial, to save people the time and effort of reading, but just haven’t gotten around to it yet. If you are a content creator yourself, please do feel free to go ahead and one-up us if you can (^_^)
Hello! I’ve made it to the last step, but when I click on a link, it says that the page “is not part of this archive.” And to “click here” to load the live page on a new tab. Though, nothing comes up. Did I miss something?
Thanks!
It’s frustrating. I found every group that I wanted to look up, but every one was members-only. I even remember my account name and password >_< The internet has failed me!
[email protected]
Thank You for helping me, to cover my yahoo account
I am so glad to belong again, to the wonderful Yahoo groups
I was so disappointed to find out that the wonderful Yahoo Groups was no longer supported. I wonder if the ones I belonged to opened up elsewhere. It was great to have them all in one spot.
Found the targets group but Is there some format available to make all the messages readable amidst the raw code?
Thank you so much, I have my group back, even though it looks all messed up with formatting information. Google Chrome book doesn’t seem to like the formatting information, it just prints it as text. But getting the WARC file to actually load and be readable even if mixed up is wonderful. I can piece it all back together in a document.
Wow – Must admit that I am still working on these steps. I was moderator of the Eva Cassidy group for over a decade. I’d so very much like to retrieve the messages.
These instructions are a JOKE, right???
Thanks for setting this up and posting. You had all the info I needed to get the yahoo group archives I was looking for. Thank you! However, perhaps have an executive summary at the top to distill the process. Something like:
1) go to https://archive.org/details/archiveteam_yahoogroups
2) Search for your group name under “search collections”
3) if you find your group, click through on the icon, then download the “WEB ARCHIVE GZ” from the right (it will download a warc.gz file)
4) after you unzip the warc.gz, use an online tool like replayweb.page to read the raw warc file
5) note: you can also rename the warc file to warc.txt and then search/process it on your computer as a giant text file (which can be easier to manage than many warc browsers, particularly if you are good with unix)
How can I recover the data from the two YAHOO GROUPS i had. Malakpet Group and SV Sales
This is such a helpful guide! I had given up hope of retrieving those old Yahoo! Groups discussions. Thank you for showing us how to navigate the Internet Archive and recover our sentimental data. I can’t wait to dive back into those memories!
If people are wondering how to get the ACTUAL group data, well, they should probably be pointed in the direction of the Yahoo Groups (Fandom) Rescue Project: https://yahoogroups.dreamwidth.org/profile
We’re still working on organizing the data, and saved a lot of groups which were Restricted for spam prevention reasons. But we are happy to confirm which groups are saved, and volunteers who help with the tagging can request specific group data to be dug out of the disorganized pile a bit early.