While Yahoo Groups hasn’t been a viable forum destination for years, it was, at one time, a popular place for people to meet and converse online. Yahoo parent company Verizon Media is finally going to completely shut Groups down. As of October 28th, no new content was permitted to be uploaded. Yahoo has announced that you can send in a request to download your data up to 11:59 PM PT on January 31st, 2020. (Originally, the deadline was December 14th, 2019.) The company adds that existing content will not be wiped until all requested downloads are complete.

If you were once a part of the discussions there, you may want to see if you can save your conversational history. The process is a little more convoluted than it needs to be, unfortunately, perhaps because Yahoo was absorbed by Verizon some time ago. But it’s still possible to do it — if you know where to look.

Find and retrieve your Yahoo Group data

Sign in to Yahoo

Go to your Privacy Dashboard. You will probably have to sign in to your account again.

Under “Your Products,” click on “Groups”

You’ll get a listing of all your Yahoo Groups. Click on the three dots in the upper right corner and select “Groups Download Manager.”

The next page will be the Download Manager, which will invite you to fill in the email address you want to be notified at (your Yahoo email address will already be filled in, but you can fill in any). Yahoo will then notify you when your download is ready.

You should get an acknowledgment of your request in your email. And then you wait. (If for any reason, you decide you don’t want your data after all, there is a link in your email that will take you back to the download manager where you can delete your request.)

At this point, you get to practice patience: it will probably be days before your data shows up. I had message history in 10 Yahoo Groups (all unused for several years; a couple practically empty). I put in a request on October 24th, and finally got an email notice that it was ready to be downloaded on November 3rd. And unfortunately, you can’t request downloads of specific groups; it’s an all-or-nothing process. So if you plan to download all your messages before the December 14th deadline, it’s a good idea to do it soon.

The zip file which held the messages from my ten groups totaled 774MB and took about five minutes to download. It contained a separate folder for each one of the groups; each folder held a single “messages.zip” file that, in turn, contained a number of .mbox files.

Mbox is a standard format for exporting email, and the easiest way to view these files is to use an email client such as Thunderbird or, if you have a Mac, the built-in Mail app. I imported one of my .mbox files using the latter and it worked quickly and efficiently. (Note to Gmail devotees: there is no easy way to import a .mbox file into a Gmail account, despite the fact that Gmail exports its email in that format. There are several third-party and open-source apps out there that purport to allow you to import .mbox files into Gmail, if you want to take a chance on one of them.)

Be aware that these are text-only downloads. You will get your messages, but you will not get any attachments or images that were associated with them. Files and images will have to be downloaded separately.

Download files and images

If you’ve uploaded files and photos (or other images) to your Yahoo Groups, you can go to your groups and download them there. Here are the instructions, in brief:

Go to your Yahoo Groups page

Go to the group that has your files and / or photos

For photos, click on “Photos” on the top menu, and click in the box labeled “Show results only from my photos”

Cursor over the photo you want to download, and click on the download icon in the lower right corner

For files, click on “Files” in the top menu

You’ll get a list of the available files in the group. Click on one to download it.

Update December 10th, 2019, 1:05PM ET: This article has been updated to include information about Yahoo’s extended deadline.