Recovering content from Yahoogroups and saving it for future use
There's this Mailman-based service of ours called Postaria.com which serves mailing-lists and e-newsletters in Spanish and Basque. We have convinced three veteran basque lists to transfer their lists from Yahoo Groups to the new service. The problem was the big archives left behind: six years, 30,000 messages and over 60 Mb of content, conversations, data, left at the almost unreachable and unsearchable Yahoo Groups archives.
But, well, little by little, we recovered those messages. It's nice to have one's content under control. Bye bye Yahoo. Welcome Mailman and Gmane.
As Gmane offers uploading of old .mbox'es as well as continued archiving of current lists, it was a perfect choice. Parallel archiving with Mailman and Gmane, and searchable all-time archives at Gmane...
Moreover, now each list-owner has its old .mbox under control, and with Mailman/Postaria they are not locked, the new .mbox currently updated daily is accesible so they can migrate again or analyze the content whenever they want.
The 3 basque lists saved by free software:
- Eibartarrak (a local group)
- Dantzan (Basque dances)
- ItzuL (professional resource for basque translators)
What happened to these lists with Yahoo worries me regarding other big-storage web services like GMail. They let you store things THERE but, at the end, it is HERE, at your hands (at the hands of the legitimate owner), where you need it.