Yahoo! to close mailing lists?
I just saw this announcement today which, if true, will mean that thousands of mailing lists will be cut off with very little notice.There are lists that deal with various academic subjects and have been used for research. Some universities run listservers of their own and may be able to take some over, but that is almost impossible at such short notice.
There are others, like genealogy groups, which have a lot of family history information that was searchable on the Web, but that too will be gone.
Yahoo is shutting down its Groups website and deleting all content:
Yahoo (owned by Engadget’s parent company Verizon) is phasing out one its longest-standing features. The internet pioneer is closing the Yahoo Groups website in a two-phase process that will effectively see it disappear. You’ll lose the ability to post new content on October 21st, and Yahoo will delete all “previously posted” material on December 14th. Users can still connect to their groups through email, but the site will effectively be vacant. All groups will be made private and require an administrator’s approval.
If you’re at all interested in preserving your history on the site, you’ll want to download your data either directly from posts or through Yahoo’s Privacy Dashboard.
It should be borne in mind that Yahoo! got into the mailing list business when it took over something called E-Groups, which ran public mail servers.
If they were concerned about their customers they would give them enough notice and time to possibly arrange for alternative mail servers. As Yahoo! took over E-groups, so other servers could possibly take over some of the lists hosted by Yahoo!. But if they leave an impossibly short time, that will not work.
If they close it down with such short notice I will certainly be removing my Yahoo! Id, and will have nothing more to do with any of their services in future.Actually Yahoo! has hardly any services left. The mailing lists were one of the last.
Yahoo! developed a reputation for taking over flourishing web services, and wrecking and killing them off. The list is a long one — Geocities, Webring, MyBlogLog, and E-groups.. And now it seems that Yahoo! itself has been taken over by another company, which is shutting them down.
A few years ago there was a group that tried to set up an alternative when some bright spark arrived and tried to change the way YahooGroups worked and almost wrecked it. I think it was called groups.io — you can find more about it here. If you know of any others, please tell about them in the comments.
I suggest that while you still have the opportunity you will not the e-mail addresses and other contact information of people on mailing lists that you would like to stay in touch with while you still have the chance.
I’ve been involved with about 50 mailing lists that deal with a great variety of topics, including:
- Missiology
- New Religious Movements
- Books and Literature
- Genealogy and family history groups (including several dealing with Single family name)
I suppose we can put it down to entropy on the Internet — if there is anything useful there, it will die.
Notes from underground 
We are trying to help everyone as much as we can to rescue Yahoo groups content. You can find more information here:
https://wp.me/p3ZMb6-Ba
Nightowl >8# Owner Moderator of the Yahoo Crusade Blog/Group.
Yahoo had a group serve before they bought e-groups. It was bad for accessibility, Yahoo proceeded to take a step backward in accessibility in 2013 with their Neuo system in 2013. Groups.io is and has been a great alternative for administrative interface for those of us who are blind. It works somewhat the same as the e-groups sytem with some extra features. My audio-pals group that that mygrated through various serves has done well in the groups.io system even with Comcast addresses. Get your stuff while you can, and move your groups to other serves while you can easily. Groups.io has a limited window for yahoogroups transfers, but you can still do it for now, think it extends safely to December 1 2019. Do it now and save your group and it’s data while you can. The roomers of 10 years ago about Yahoo closing Yahoogroups down have more or less come true. I dont mind the fact that all are private groups, I’ve never beeen happy with public archives, because any idiot can also put crap into your group, but this is a round about way to get rid of something that doesn’t produce direct revenue for whoever own’s yahoogroups in it’s current encoranation. Leave the dark side and get rid of Yahoogroups and move your group to another serve.
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