I also asked for and got one of these files. Mine
took something like
30
hours, and gave me a 584 MB .zip file. I tried it using a Windows 10
machine, and it consists of directories, each with the name of a group
I'm
subscribed to. Opening each directory, there are one or more .zip
files
in it; for example, files.zip, links.zip, and messages.zip are in one
I'm
looking at now. files.zip contains the files without further
complication, with their directory structure from Yahoo maintained.
links.zip contains .url files. messages.zip contains files of the
format
1959542.mbox.00001, 1959542.mbox.00002, 1959542.mbox.00003, etc. These
seem to be 10 MB (uncompressed) chunks of the concatenated messages, in
plaintext format as email messages. I haven't tried feeding them to
something like Pine, but it would appear to be compatible. Email
addresses appear to be intact, with the exception of one group I looked
at
with messages back into 1999 (perhaps they started on egroups or
something). The one thing that does not appear to be there is photos,
unless they were stored as "files."
Overall, it's exactly what I would have hoped to get, with the
exception
of the photos.
I had the same experience, although mine was much smaller (only one group,
not very active and not with many files). Overall very painless.
-All