Verizon, which bought Yahoo in 2017, has suspended the emails of archivers trying to preserve 20 years of content that will be permanently deleted within a few weeks.
As Verizon announced in October, the company plans to delete all content from Yahoo. Starting December 14, all content previously posted to the website will be permanently removed.
The bulk deletion includes files, polls, links, photos, folders, database, calendar, attachments, conversations, email updates, message snippets and message uploaded to Yahoo servers since the pre-Google 1990s era.
Verizon had planned to allow users to download their own data from the site's privacy dashboard, but apparently has a problem with the Archive team's project to save content for upload to the non-profit Internet, which runs the popular Wayback Machine site.
"Yahoo has banned all email addresses that archive team volunteers used to join Yahoo Groups to download data," the Yahoo Groups Archive Team said.
“Verizon has also made it impossible for the Archive Team to continue using semi-automated scripts to join Yahoo Groups – meaning each group has to come back one by one, an impossible task (repeat the last four weeks of work for the next 10 days).”
News of the apparently aggressive move by Verizon was first reported on boingboing.net. The Yahoo Groups Archive Team claims to be facing a near 80% total data loss because Verizon is blocking group.
The Yahoo Groups website is not widely used today, but it was in the past. The size of the file the group is trying to save is significant, and the group had saved about 1.8 billion messages by the end of 2018.
According to the Archive Team: “As of 2019-10-16 the directory lists 5,619,351 groups, of which 2,752,112 have been discovered. 1,483,853 (54%) have public message archives with an estimated number of 2.1 billion messages (1,389 messages per group average so far) – 1.8 billion messages (86%) have been archived from 2018 to 28.
Verizon issued a statement to the group supporting the Archive Team, telling concerned users that “the resources required to preserve historical content from pages are cost-prohibitive, as they are largely unused.”
The telecommunications giant also said that people affected by the service violated its terms and said the number of users affected was small.
"Regarding the 128 individuals who joined Yahoo Groups with the intent to archive them, their actions violate our Terms of Service, and due to this violation , we are unable to renew the service," Verizon said.
“Also, Archive moderators can ban users if they violate terms , so members who have been banned in the past will not be able to download content from this Archive.
Additionally, Verizon said the platform's email feature will continue to work, at least for members who haven't been suspended.
“While users will no longer be able to post or upload content to the site, email. If you are experiencing issues with this feature, please reach out to YahooGroupsEscalations@verizonmedia.com and we will attempt to resolve the issue as quickly as possible,” the Verizon spokesperson wrote.
