Category Archives: Yahoo

YahooGroups sails into the sunset – export your data now

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YahooGroups is mostly shutting down.

This official notice tries to describe what’s being removed and what isn’t, but succeeds in being a bit confusing: emails to groups will keep working, but “Conversations” and “Email updates” won’t.

My reading is you’ll still be able to send emails and they’ll be distributed – but nothing else will work.

But I’d also assume this is not a business they want to be in anymore, so even emails will probably be discontinued before too long.

There’s an option to download all your data: it’s accessible via this link: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/getmydata

It took a week for it to be ready.

Then it took 5 goes for the download to actually work. It repeatedly conked out part way through.

When it finally worked, the result (for me) is a 1.6 Gb zip file with everything from (it appears) every group I’m in, including messages, files and everything else.

Inside the subdirectories for each group is:

  • files.zip
  • links.zip
  • medias.json – this seems to be metadata for the photos and attachments, below
  • messages.zip – looks to be mbox files with the entire archive of messages
  • photos_and_attachments.zip

I can’t see some of the more esoteric data from YG, such as Databases, Polls and Events. Export of those might have to be a manual process.

If you’re interested in getting your data, I’d get onto it now. It’s all scheduled to be wiped in mid-December, and the process may become even slower than a week.

2020-01-16: The deadline was extended to the end of January 2020.

Yahoo groups spam

On a couple of Yahoo Groups I’m on, we’ve noted spams coming through from long-time members in the last week or two.

The good news is there’s no need to panic. Most probably a spammer out there has worked out that person X posts to list Y, and is forging emails from them from a remote location. Which means it is unlikely that X’s computer has been compromised. (Though of course it’s good practice to have virus protection and regularly do scans.)

If you’re an Admin of a Yahoo Group, you might like to check the Posting settings (group management / Group Settings / Messages / Posting and archives). There is a Spam Filtering option which I believe is switched off by default (it might be a newly added setting).

On the groups I’m on, we had spam coming through, but setting the Filtering on seems to have prevented more of it.

Oh no…

If you are a member of one or more Yahoo Groups, and dread the newbies who unwittingly send through humongous attachments, then watch out.

Just a heads up that the maximum file size that can be attached to a message has been increased from 1.5 megabytes to 15 megabytes. — Yahoo Groups blog

15 megabytes?! Why on earth would they want to allow attachments of that size through email, particularly when YG has

shared files functionality? Ironically the shared files can only be up to 5 Mb.

God help you if you're on dialup.

And we know that YG already has reliability problems. Who knows what'll happen when people are regularly emailing through 15Mb video files.

Of course, group moderators can flick the switch to filter out all attachments, but it's a case of all or nothing.

(Nice to see Yahoo keep a tight lid on people leaving comment spam on their official blogs. heh.)

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