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. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is re ...

management

web site A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wikipe ...

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

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 services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...

and is now a part of

Yahoo! Groups Yahoo! Groups was a free-to-use system of 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 subscribe to various grou ...

, which as of the end of 2019 are under

Verizon Verizon Communications Inc., commonly known as Verizon, is an American multinational telecommunications conglomerate and a corporate component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company is headquartered at 1095 Avenue of the Americas in ...

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 R. Martin Roscheisen is an Austrian-American technology entrepreneur. Early life Roscheisen was born and raised in Munich, Germany, as an Austrian citizen. Attending Feodor Lynen high school near Munich, he graduated valedictorian in 1987. As a ...

). Carl V. Page, Jr. 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 Venture capital financing is a type of funding by venture capital. It is private equity capital that can be provided at various stages or funding rounds. Common funding rounds include early-stage seed funding in high-potential, growth companies ( ...

round of $810,000 from

Atlas Venture Atlas Venture is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in life sciences startup companies in the U.S. Atlas is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the majority of its investments are located. Atlas rolled out its eleventh ...

in May 1998. In October 1998, with 1.2 million users (growing at 12,000 users per day),

Excite Excitation, excite, exciting, or excitement may refer to: * Excitation (magnetic), provided with an electrical generator or alternator * Excite Ballpark, located in San Jose, California * Excite (web portal), web portal owned by IAC * Electron ex ...

offered to acquire the company for $40m but the company decided instead to take $5.1 million more investment money from

Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm. The firm is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. , Sequoia's total a ...

. 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 investment ...

but instead merged with

ONElist ONElist was a free mailing list service created by Mark Fletcher in August 1997. In November 1999 ONElist merged with eGroups. In June 2000 eGroups was purchased by Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services ...

, 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 $432m 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 removrf the existence of files in the Groups on January 31, 2020. Mailing lists are still 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 Mailing list software Web 1.0 Discontinued Yahoo! services Products introduced in 1997 {{website-stub