1. Wiki
  2. FAQ on Moving from Yahoo Groups
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Yahoo Easy Transfer:

Groups.io is not accepting new transfer requests. 

Those who have paid but were unable to execute an Easy Group Transfer will issued a refund upon request. Just email Mark at support@groups.io and he will refund your money and delete your group.

 

1. Is groups.io free?

Yes. It is free for members, and it is free for a group on the Basic plan. It is not free to use the Groups.io Transfer Agent - see #2.
Pricing and features: https://groups.io/static/pricing

2. How do I move my Yahoo Group to Groups.io?

  • If you just want to start a new group and invite everyone to join, see https://groups.io/g/GroupManagersForum/wiki/Inviting-new-members

  • If you don't need to use the Transfer Agent, you can also upgrade your group to the Premium For One Month plan and use Direct Add to import everyone that you have an email address for, see #8 below and https://groups.io/g/GroupManagersForum/wiki/Direct-Add-From-Yahoo
    This will not allow you to use the Groups.io Transfer Agent.

  • Or you can have Groups.io transfer (move) your group. To use the Transfer Agent, you must upgrade your group to the Premium Yearly plan or to an Enterprise plan. You must pay before you start the transfer process. (You cannot be on a month-to-month payment plan.)

    It is a step-by-step process, so Stay Calm, Don't Panic, and Just Read the Instructions. Including this FAQ, and the pages it cites.

    Important: To use the Transfer Agent, you must be
    • either an owner of the Yahoo group, or
    • a moderator with both the “Invite and add members” and “Add, remove, and change moderator privileges” privileges.

If you can't invite people to your Y!Group, or cannot promote them to Moderator, see FAQ 14, below.


See https://groups.io/yahootransfer for status of transfers.

3. How much does it cost for a premium group?

The cost is $220 USD per year for the Premium Yearly plan (effective 2019-10-22). This allows you to use the groups.io transfer agent. You can change the group back to the Basic plan after the year if you wish.


4 (a) Can I transfer a Yahoo Group into a Subgroup?

Yes. Upgrading your Primary Group to the Premium Yearly plan covers your subgroups as well. No extra fee to transfer YG into subgroups.

Your subgroups will maintain their own place in the transfer queue.

Note: you can't create any subgroups until the primary group gets approved. For more info on subgroups, see Why use a Subgroup for more information about subgroups. 

4 (b) Can I transfer more than one Yahoo Group into one Groups.io group?

Yes. The Premium Yearly plan allows multiple Yahoo Groups to be transferred to your Primary group and/or its subgroups. You can do this all at once: set everything up to be completely ready to transfer, but only give the go-ahead for one at a time, if possible.

If you transfer more than one Yahoo Group into the same Primary or Subgroup the additional content appends to what's already been transferred. Any members already present in the Groups.io group will not be transferred again by later transfers.

5. What gets transferred using the Transfer Agent?

Groups.io can transfer message archives, properly owned and properly threaded, (without attachments, however), photos, files, links and databases.

  • Calendar entries are not copied at this time.
  • Subscribers (members) are also transferred, maintaining their subscription options and ownership of each message and other group content.
  • Links get transferred to the databases. (You must enable Databases in Admin to see them.)
  • Those with "no mail" status in YG migrating to a Groups.io group with "no mail" disabled will have Special Notice status instead.

6. How do I upgrade my group to Premium?

In Admin, choose +Upgrade

Or go to:

https://YOURGROUP.groups.io/g/main/billing

(substitute your group name)

You have to be a group Owner, or a Moderator with the "Billing" privilege.

7. Where are instructions for transferring to groups.io?

8. How do I check the transfer status?

Transfers are queued up when you first set it up and processed in that order until you get to Step 5. 

At that point they are re-ordered based on when the transfer go-ahead is given and uploaded to groups.io in that order.

When you click on the green "Set Up New Transfer" button at bottom left of the Yahoo groups transfer page (https://groups.io/yahootransfer), a new page will come up where you can enter the source and destination group names. 

There is also a series of checkboxes for the various areas of the group to transfer (files, photos, members, messages, etc). Simply uncheck the ones you don't want before clicking the "Start New Transfer Process" button.

See https://groups.io/g/GroupManagersForum/message/19948

(a) If you've already started a transfer:

Go to the Yahoo transfer page at https://groups.io/yahootransfer

Select the transfer you want to check status on from "Existing Transfers" at lower right (i.e.: click on the name)

The box at the top of the resulting page will tell you the status of that transfer.

Repeat for any other transfers you may have in progress.

 - if the status is the message that starts "Make sure you have sent an invite to your group":

This means that Groups.io has not received your invite yet and that you should send another one. They will send you an email once they have received an invite. If this message hasn't been updated within 6 hours of you sending your invite, please send another one. This notice will be updated when they have received your invite. 

(b) For transfers that are actually approved and in progress, see where you are in the queue:

When you go to edit your transfer, if it's been submitted for transfer, you'll now see one of these 4 status lines:

  • Your group is awaiting export from Yahoo. [Stage 1 of 4]
  • Your group is being exported from Yahoo right now. [Stage 2 of 4]
  • Your group is awaiting import into Groups.io. There are about N groups ahead of it in the queue. [Stage 3 of 4] **
  • Your group is being imported into Groups.io right now. [Stage 4 of 4]

** Where N in Stage 3 is an estimate as to where you are in the queue. i.e. Your group is about 70th in the queue right now.

Stage 4 is the biggest bottleneck, as only so many groups at a time can be imported without overloading the system. There's no estimate as to how long each group takes to be imported, because each group is different (how many photos, how many messages, etc).

(c) 14. See also - 

https://groups.io/g/GroupManagersForum/wiki/Transfer-from-Yahoo-Groups

The full wiki for members and group managers on transferring.

 

9. How do I stop people posting on Yahoo Groups after the transfer?

If you didn't uncheck the 'Send a message to your members when the transfer is complete' box they will be sent a welcome message (ditto if you have a group welcome message). That will be tracked for bouncing. Whether that actually triggers someone being removed depends on the type of bounce back received.

Assuming you have already sent the group a notice of intent to transfer, you only need follow up with those who didn't get the message. The easiest way is to put the entire group on moderation. Or in the YahooGroup management settings, you can set it so that nobody can post to the group.

After transfer you could post the group email address on YahooGroups saying that this group has moved.

You might suggest the members tidy up their address book. In Apple Mail, you can delete unwanted previous recipients (under Window).

See https://groups.io/g/GroupManagersForum/wiki/Transfer-from-Yahoo-Groups#Y21group-after-the-transfer

 

10. What are my alternatives to paying for the Premium Yearly plan?

(a) Moving members yourself:

To obtain a list of your Yahoo Group members you can go to the Manage Members page and in the Actions menu Export (download) a csv or tsv format file. It is best to open the file in a spreadsheet like Excel, then you can easily copy the Email column to paste into the Direct Add or Invite page. Note: this is only for groups with 1000 or fewer members, due to Yahoo's Export restriction.

  • Send a message to your YahooGroups members on YahooGroups inviting them to join your new home. Include the URL. Or tell them to send a blank email to the Subscribe email address found at the bottom of your group's home page (that is, [GROUPNAME]+subscribe@groups.io  substituting the real group name for GROUPNAME). Since you won't be using a G.io invitation, you may have trouble tracking members who don't respond. 

(b) Moving message archive, photos, etc. yourself:

  1. You can download content from Yahoo - see https://groups.io/g/GroupManagersForum/message/19430 

  2. There are a few third-party solutions to do that, including PG OFFLINE, and a Chrome browser plugin
    (PG Offline is a Windows program.)

  3. The problem is what to do with the message archive once downloaded; as there is really no good way to re-upload it to groups.io, to re-link individual messages to their owners, or to provide online message search capability.  It's not the same as a transfer and loses "ownership", but Lena has a way to get the messages into the archive, https://groups.io/g/GroupManagersForum/message/22251

  4. An option is simply to print the collection of old messages to a PDF file; at which point you can upload that to the files area of your group. That will give you something, even if it isn't conveniently indexed and searchable.

  5. It is possible the Groups.io may be able to move MBOX files in. (Been mused about. Not a sure thing.) But see (3) above and #14. 

  6. Archive Team is backing up the entire Yahoo Groups on https://tracker.archiveteam.org/yahoogroups/ This group has a few thousand computers activated as a massive effort to retrieve and archive all of YG.  No matter how big or small the group may be.  As for private groups, they do 1 of 2 things, 1) request membership and then archive or 2)  ask from their site for owners and mods to send an invite to the group.  See https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Current_Projects

Currently  (Nov 2019), the only way to have the correct ownership for files is to have the owner upload it.

(c) Photos and files:

You'd need to move them manually if you're not paying for a transfer.  It can be time consuming and "ownership" of all the items will be in your name.  If the person that originally uploaded a picture is on the new group, you can manually assign ownership to them (if you know who it was.)  There's currently not a similar function for Files.

See also #14 below about Mbox.

11. Where can I find out about starting my group and setting it up?

See: https://groups.io/g/GroupManagersForum/wiki/Quick-Start-for-Group-Formation

12. Where can I find more info on inviting people to my groups.io group?

https://groups.io/g/GroupManagersForum/wiki/Inviting-new-members

13. Where can I find instructions for joining a group?

https://groups.io/g/GroupManagersForum/wiki/Joining-a-group

14. Moving messages to Groups.io in mbox format

If you can obtain the group's messages in mbox format, Groups.io can import them into your Groups.io group. For this, you must pre-pay for a year of premium service for your Groups.io group. Contact support if/when you're ready to go ahead with that. Note that the mbox import includes only the group's messages, you will still need to copy the group's members list, photos, files, and other content by alternate means (see above).

Yahoo Groups: You can obtain your Yahoo Group's messages in mbox format by requesting a download from Yahoo's getmydata function. To do this you must sign in to Yahoo as at least a member of the group in question. Yahoo will ask you to re-confirm your sign-in credentials each time you visit this page (first to request the download, then to download it when ready): https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/getmydata You will be given a link to one or more zip files to download, the mbox files for your group's messages will be nested within (one of) those zip files. You must request the download before December 14 in order for your request to be honored.

(New: Nov 22, 2019)

The official Groups.io user documentation is in the Groups.io Help Center.