Yahoo! Hacks

Archive Yahoo! Groups Messages with yahoo2mbox

Looking to keep a local archive of your favorite mailing list? With yahoo2mbox, you can import the final results into your favorite mailer.

With the popularity of Yahoo! Groups (http://groups.yahoo.com) comes a problem. Sometimes, you want to save the archives of a Yahoo! Group, access the archives outside the Yahoo! Groups site, or move your list somewhere else and take your existing archive with you.

The Code

Vadim Zeitlin had these same concerns, which is why he wrote yahoo2mbox (http://www.tt-solutions.com/en/products/yahoo2mbox). This hack retrieves all the messages from a mailing list archive at Yahoo! Groups and saves them to a local file in mbox format. Plenty of options make this handy to have when you’re trying to transfer information from Yahoo! Groups. You’ll need Perl and several additional modules to run this code, including Getopt::Long, HTML::Entities, HTML::HeadParser, HTML::TokeParser, and LWP::UserAgent.

Running the Hack

Running the code looks like this:

	              perl yahoo2mbox.pl 
               [options] [-o mbox] groupname

The options for running the program are as follows:

 --help give the usage message showing the program options --version show the program version and exit --verbose give verbose informational messages (default) --quiet be silent, only error messages are given --resume resume an interrupted download -o mbox save the message to mbox instead of file named groupname --start=n start retrieving messages at index n instead of ...