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Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, and I am not amused. I'm also not a freeloader demanding support for a free account. Over the years, my wife and I have paid almost $1,000 to Mozilla's bookmarking service for secure article storage.
Let me give you an analogy. You paid a storage facility to hold physical boxes containing business records. They did their job for years, and you kept paying them. Then, suddenly, you get a notice that you have a few months to come to the facility to pick up your boxes. That sucks, but you rent a truck and go to the facility.
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So far, so good. The facility hands you your boxes, all labeled appropriately. But the contents inside have all been destroyed. Every last box is now empty. And they think you should be grateful because they let you have your boxes back.
OK, let's give a digital analogy. You've been paying a Dropbox-like company to store your data online. For whatever reason, the Dropbox-like company decides to shut down. They give you a few months to request your data. You make that request, wait a day or so, and then get back a list of the filenames stored. Just the filenames. The data itself is gone.
This is what Pocket is doing. I (and thousands of other users) paid Pocket to store our carefully curated articles from around the web. Many of us did so specifically to have a way to get at those documents if the original sites went down, changed the articles, or the articles otherwise experienced web rot.
And now, Pocket has given us until October 8 to request a list of the URLs. The contents are not exportable. Mozilla (which owns Pocket) is giving us no way to recover the contents of all the articles we paid them to store.
(I'm working on follow-on articles that will help you use AI and open-source software to build your own system to replace Pocket and retrieve at least some of the data that Pocket refuses to return. Stay tuned.)
And with that, let's see what we can recover.
How to retrieve your data from Pocket
The page that describes how to export your data is here on the Pocket site. To request an export from Pocket, go to this URL.
Then Pocket will send you a message confirming your request.
After that, it may take up to 24 hours to receive a link to download your data. The company says that it could take more than 24 hours for larger accounts and that "in some cases, it can take up to 7 days to receive the export email."
While it might take up to 7 days to get the export email, you have only 48 hours to use it. After that, the link expires, and you'll have to make your request again.
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Because why would you take the easy way out and just let folks just right-click and Save As?
My export process
My export process went fairly smoothly. I visited https://getpocket.com/export and typed in the email address I use with my Pocket account.
It's important that you confirm this is a working email address. You won't be able to download your data until you get the download link, which you can't get if your address isn't working.
After I entered my email address, I was transferred to a page with an export ID on it.
I also got the email shown above, which also contained the export ID.
Then it was time to wait. It took about two hours to get the email containing my download link.
Clicking the download link resulted in me retrieving a pocket.zip file, which I saved to my local drive. Unzipping the file resulted in three CSV files, two with about 10,000 records each and one with 4,480 records.
You can open the .CSV files in Excel or Google Sheets.
Each file consisted of five fields:
- Title: This sometimes contained a workable title for saved article; otherwise, it's a clone of the URL field.
- Url: This is the URL of the article you saved to Pocket.
- Time_added: A POSIX time stamp that represents seconds since Jan. 1, 1970. The time stamps in the above screenshot indicate the articles shown were all saved in 2018.
- Tags: If you painstakingly create tags (as I did), they will contain nothing. Pocket isn't exporting tags. The joke's on all of us.
- Status: Indicates if you read or simply archived the article.
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This downloaded data set contains little useful information except the URL field. It should be obvious by now, but none of the saved article content has been made available for export.
What now?
All told, it looks like I saved 24,480 articles. That's not 100% clear, because Pocket doesn't say how many items have been saved over the years. The 24,480 count is the number of records in the .CSV files, which one would hope is similar to the number of articles saved.
Even so, the data exported is a far cry from what we've been paying Pocket/Mozilla for all these years. A URL, no tags, and a badly formatted title are poor compensation for the loss of the content of the items saved.
It may be possible to re-download the contents from some of the saved URLs, but that's not the same as the original downloads. Many of the URLs saved may have rotted by now, and there is no way to download the information that was once there.
Other URLs contain content that changes over time, and an article downloaded in 2018 at a given URL may be vastly different in 2025. If you had reason to reference the original article, that would no longer be possible except, maybe, if it's indexed on archive.org. Otherwise, all those historical records have just been nuked.
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It's not a good feeling, and certainly doesn't make me feel good about Mozilla as a whole. I'm not a big Firefox user (I was back in the day), but now I think I'm just going to uninstall it, as a small display of personal protest.
And don't let the "non-profit" status of Mozilla fool you into thinking that some poor, cash-strapped non-profit had to delete all your data to stay alive. Mozilla's last published audited financial statement, from 2023, showed that the company had net assets of $1.335 billion. Billion.
I think they could have afforded to keep Pocket going, or at least let us download all of our data, article content included. Or at least the frickin' tags. What? Letting us download our tags could have killed them? Really?
Anyway, stay tuned. I'm working on something of a solution to this mess. I'll be back as soon as I'm ready to show you what I've found.
What about you? Did you rely on Pocket to preserve articles for long-term access? Were you surprised by Mozilla's decision to remove access to saved content? Have you tried retrieving your own Pocket export? If so, what did you get back? Do you feel that the export met your expectations or did it fall short? What alternatives are you now exploring to preserve web content going forward? Let us know in the comments below.
You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to subscribe to my weekly update newsletter, and follow me on Twitter/X at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, on Bluesky at @DavidGewirtz.com, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.
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