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Do you want to download an archive of an entire Yahoo Group? Here’s how. But do it today, because you may not be able to do it this way after tomorrow.

Background: Yahoo stores Yahoo Groups messages and files on their servers, but (as I understand it) they’re removing access to those after Saturday the 14th. After that date, you can still send Yahoo an official request for the archive until sometime in January; but their system for letting you download archives doesn’t always include everything.

[Update: it’s unclear whether the messages in their archives are going away or not. They’re removing “content,” including “Message History,” but I’m not sure whether that means that the emails in the archives count as content; it’s possible that they’re removing files and photos, but not the email archives. Still, this seems like a good time to download everything.]

So instead of using their system, you can use the yahoo-group-archiver command-line tool, which downloads everything from a given group.

(Setting it up and running it requires a little bit of tech skill, but the process went remarkably smoothly for me, not at all like my usual painful experience of trying to get command-line tools running.)

It seems to take very roughly an hour per 500 messages in a given Group, so if your Group has a lot of messages, then get this started soon.

After you download the archives, you can use yahoo-group-archive-tools to convert the downloaded messages into email format.

(This one is slightly harder to install, but even so, the process for this one also went surprisingly smoothly.)

Both tools seem to do a great job of handling all sorts of situations; I’m really impressed with the care and effort that went into creating them.

Many thanks to Janice for telling me about yahoo-group-archiver!