Notice That Yahoo! Groups Was Going to Shut Down

Yahoo! Groups was started in January 2001, when Yahoo! merged its own Yahoo! Clubs, started in 1998, with eGroups which had been started in 1997. Yahoo! had acquired eGroups.com in August 2000.

A number of Pacifica and WBAI mailing lists had been using eGroups and so they were automatically integrated into the new Yahoo! Groups. More Yahoo! Groups were founded to address issues affecting Pacifica and the various stations over the years. Some of them had hundreds of subscribers. Some had only a few. Some went from being a hotbed of Pacifica and local station discourse to a moribund state, often because the owner of the group started censoring people.

After the new bylaws were adopted for Pacifica in 2003, the Local Station Boards, the Pacifica National Board and the many committees of all of those entities set up even more mailing lists on Yahoo! Groups. They also deposited files that the mailing list members had either sent to each other via E-mail or had posted directly to the groups' archives. These Yahoo! Groups became a de facto archive of just about everything that had been done by those engaged in the governance of the Pacifica Foundation. Official communications from Pacifica Management were also posted to these lists.

In July 2016, Verizon bought Yahoo!

In October 2019, Yahoo! announced that they were going to turn Yahoo! Groups into an E-mail-only service.

In January 2020, Yahoo! deleted the archives, which they referred to as content, and so the files, the record of the E-mails and most of the history of the Pacifica Foundation for the previous 20 years was gone. Yahoo! Groups continued as an E-mail service, albeit one that retained no record of any of the E-mails sent by the service.

Below is the official notice of the shutting down of Yahoo! Groups, and all of those Pacifica mailing lists, which was sent out in October 2020. Within a couple of days of the official December 15, 2020, deadline all of the Yahoo! Groups mailing lists went dead.


Notice that Yahoo! Groups was going to shut down

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