eGroups.com was an

email list A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. Mailing lists are often rented or sold. If rented, the renter agrees to use the mailing list only at contra ...

management

website A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, educatio ...

. The site allowed users to create their own mailing lists and sign up for membership. The website provided

archives An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials, in any medium, or the physical facility in which they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organ ...

of the messages as well as list management functionality. Each group also had a shared calendar, file space, group chat, and a simple way to communicate. eGroups was bought in August 2000 by

Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...

and became a part of

Yahoo! Groups Yahoo! Groups was a free-to-use system of Electronic mailing list, electronic mailing lists offered by Yahoo!. Prior to February 2020, Yahoo! Groups was one of the world's largest collections of online discussion boards. It allowed members to s ...

, which as of the end of 2019 were under

Verizon Verizon Communications Inc. ( ), is an American telecommunications company headquartered in New York City. It is the world's second-largest telecommunications company by revenue and its mobile network is the largest wireless carrier in the ...

ownership.

History

The service was started by Scott Hassan in 1997 as an email list archiving service called FindMail (mimicking the name "FindLaw", a company co-founded by Martin Roscheisen). Carl Victor Page Jr.,

Larry Page Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American businessman, computer engineer and computer scientist best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin. Page was chief executive officer of Google from 1997 until August 2001 when ...

's brother, joined the company in May 1997. When Martin Roscheisen joined as CEO in March 1998, FindMail was incorporated (in June 1998) and shifted its focus towards hosting email groups. FindMail, then renamed ''eGroups'', grew to 250,000 users before taking a

venture finance A venture round is a type of funding round used for venture capital financing, by which startup company, startup companies obtain investment, generally from venture capitalists and other institutional investors. The availability of venture fundi ...

round of $810,000 from Atlas Venture in May 1998. In October 1998, with 1.2 million users (growing at 12,000 users per day), Excite offered to acquire the company for $40 million, but the company decided instead to take $5.1 million more investment money from

Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital Operations, LLC is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California, specializing in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. the firm had appro ...

. In September 1999, eGroups started work on an

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investm ...

but instead merged with ONElist, with 13 million users exchanging more than 1.3 billion email messages each month. In January 2000, the company raised $42 million and filed a S-1 with the SEC on March 23, 2000. In August 2000, with 18 million users, the company was bought by

for $432 million in a stock deal and became

. In 2019, Verizon bought Yahoo! and shut down the ability to upload new files on October 29, 2019, and removed the existence of files in the Groups on January 31, 2020, with mailing lists remaining available. On October 12, 2020, Yahoo announced it would permanently shut down Yahoo!Groups effective December 15, 2020. After that date, all groups would be deleted and the service would no longer be available.

References

Yahoo! acquisitions Electronic mailing lists Web 1.0 Discontinued Yahoo! services Products introduced in 1997 {{website-stub