Pocket export after shutdown: what to do with the file

Your Pocket export is a CSV (free users) or HTML (Premium archive) file. Import the CSV into Raindrop.io, Instapaper, or Readwise Reader using their built-in Pocket importers, or upload the HTML to a PKM tool that accepts bookmarks. If you missed the 8 October 2025 export deadline, the data is gone — Mozilla queued it for deletion on 12 November 2025.

Mozilla announced the Pocket shutdown on 22 May 2025 and pulled the live service on 8 July 2025. For three months after that, the only thing the Pocket site did was hand back your data (Mozilla Support: Future of Pocket). The export window closed on 8 October 2025 and the deletion job ran on 12 November 2025.

If you grabbed your file in time, you now have a folder somewhere on your laptop with thousands of saved URLs and no app to open them in. This guide walks through what is in that file, where it goes, and how to stop the next read-later app from holding your library hostage.

What is inside the Pocket export file?

Free accounts received part_000000.csv — a UTF-8 comma-separated file with five columns: title, url, time_added (Unix epoch seconds), tags (pipe-separated), and status (unread or archive). Premium subscribers had the option of an older ril_export.html — a Netscape-format bookmark file with the same metadata stuffed into <DT><A> tag attributes. Both files include archived items, not just unread queue.

What the file does NOT contain: your highlights (Pocket Premium feature, separate file), your read position inside articles, recommended-to-you metadata, and the full parsed article text. Pocket served reader-view by re-parsing the URL each time. You are getting the bookmark list, not the cached content. If the original site is gone, your saved article is also gone unless you also pulled it through the Wayback Machine.

A quick wc -l on the CSV tells you the count. Most multi-year Pocket users land somewhere between 800 and 5,000 rows. The biggest mistake people make at this step is opening the CSV in Excel and letting it mangle the UTF-8 encoding on titles. Open in a plain text editor first, confirm the BOM, and only then load it into a spreadsheet (Mozilla export docs).

Where can you import a Pocket CSV in 2026?

Three apps built dedicated Pocket-import paths during the 2025 sunset window and still maintain them today: Raindrop.io, Instapaper, and Readwise Reader. Matter and Omnivore (now archived) also offered importers, but Omnivore shut down in November 2024 and Matter has gone quiet. Below is a side-by-side of what each surviving import preserves and what the destination app actually does with your saved URLs.

How do you actually run the migration step by step?

The import paths look similar across all three of the survivor apps, but the gotchas differ. Here is the workflow that actually finishes without errors.

Step 1: Validate the CSV locally. Open part_000000.csv in a plain text editor. Confirm the header row reads title,url,time_added,tags,status. If your file looks like one long unbroken line, the line endings are CR-only — pass it through tr '\r' '\n' < part_000000.csv > cleaned.csv first.

Step 2: Pick one destination. Do not import the same file into three apps and try to decide later. You will end up with three half-organized libraries and zero working ones. Pick on cost and reading style — see the table above.

Step 3: Run the import. Raindrop accepts the CSV directly at help.raindrop.io/import; the importer asks which column maps to which field and offers a dry-run preview. Instapaper accepts CSV at instapaper.com/import but limits free accounts to 250 items per import — split a big file with split -l 250 cleaned.csv part_. Readwise Reader has a one-click Pocket option that handles tags and archive state without extra mapping (readwise.io/import).

Step 4: Spot-check 20 random URLs. Most articles you saved years ago no longer resolve. Sites die, paywalls move, URLs get rewritten. Anything that returns 404 is dead in the new tool too unless you also have a Wayback snapshot. Skip the dead links instead of treating them as a search backlog.

Step 5: Decide what archive even means. Pocket's "archive" flag was inconsistent — some people used it as "read," others as "important to keep." Look at 30 archived items and pick a consistent meaning before you import, or just import everything as unread and re-triage in the new tool.

What if you missed the October 2025 export deadline?

If 8 October 2025 came and went without you exporting, the official answer is short: the data is gone. Mozilla's support page confirms that "As of November 12, 2025, user data export has been disabled, and all user data has been queued for permanent deletion. The Pocket API was disabled on November 12, 2025" (support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/future-of-pocket).

There are two partial recovery paths worth trying:

First, browser history. If you used the Pocket Chrome extension on a single laptop and never cleared history, the URLs you saved are mostly still in chrome://history. Search by domain, export with an extension like History Trends Unlimited, and dedupe against the URLs you remember saving. This is fragile — it only catches saves where you also visited the page in the same browser session.

Second, email confirmations. If you ever used Pocket's "send to Pocket" via email or the "save tweet" path, your sent/received mailbox has the original URLs. Search your inbox for pocket.co and getpocket.com — both shortener domains appear in confirmation emails. You will not get tags or archive status, just URLs.

Neither path recovers your highlights. Pocket Premium highlights lived in a separate database, and Mozilla never offered a public way to export them. They are gone.

How do you make old Pocket articles searchable again?

The import gets URLs into a new tool. The harder problem is the one most Pocket users had even before the shutdown — finding the article you saved three years ago when you can only remember the topic, not the title.

This is where the import-and-walk-away path breaks down. Raindrop and Instapaper both rely on tag-and-folder structure. If your Pocket library was 3,000 untagged URLs (the most common case), it lands in the new tool as 3,000 untagged URLs. The only thing you can do is keyword-search the title field, which fails the moment you forget the title.

Four ways people are solving this in 2026:

Re-tag with AI. Raindrop's Pro tier offers AI auto-tag at $3/month — point it at your imported library and it generates tags from page content for items where the page still resolves. Roughly 70% useful, 30% noise. (raindrop.io/pricing)

Highlight as you re-read. Readwise Reader's model is that you actually reopen the saves. The act of highlighting creates the searchable layer. Slow but durable. (readwise.io/pricing)

Move to a meaning-search tool. Tools like dEssence index every save by what it is about, not what it is called. You ask "the article about why open-source maintainers burn out" and it finds the right URL even if your title was "hn-link-4827." Memory you don't have to maintain.

Triage and delete. The honest option. Most Pocket libraries were 80% never-going-to-read aspirational saves. Open the new tool, set a 30-day rule, and delete anything you have not opened.

"I exported 4,200 articles from Pocket and imported them into Raindrop. Six months later I have opened maybe twenty of them. The export was psychological — I needed to know the data was safe before I could admit I was never going to read most of it."

— Pocket user, r/pocket migration thread

Which Pocket alternative fits your reading style?

The table above lays out the tradeoffs by feature. Here is the same decision by reader profile.

If you used Pocket as a queue (save in morning, read on subway): Instapaper. Closest one-to-one match — clean reader, archive flow, text-to-speech, offline downloads. $2.99/month gets you unlimited highlights and full-text search (instapaper.com/premium).

If you used Pocket as a tag-organized library (longform research, by topic): Raindrop.io. Tag tree, nested collections, full-text search on free tier, 10,000-item free limit. Pro at $3/month removes the cap and adds AI-tagging and broken-link checking (raindrop.io/pricing).

If you used Pocket alongside Twitter saves, YouTube, and PDFs: Readwise Reader. Single inbox for every long-form input including PDFs, RSS, email newsletters, and tweets. Auto-syncs highlights into your existing Readwise account if you have one. $9.99/month flat.

If you used Pocket and wished it had real search: dEssence. Save it, forget it, ask for it later. Three save surfaces — Chrome extension, web app at dessence.ai, Telegram bot — and you ask in your own words, no folders, no tags, no organizing. Honest tradeoffs: still in beta, free tier capped at 500 items, paid tier pricing not finalized.

What about the highlights and tags from Pocket Premium?

Pocket Premium subscribers paid $4.99/month or $44.99/year for two main features: unlimited highlights and a permanent library copy that survived link rot. The highlights export was promised in the shutdown announcement but delivered as a separate file named pocket_highlights.csv for users who had highlights enabled. Columns: article_url, highlight_text, created_at.

Readwise Reader is the only Pocket alternative with a documented highlight-import path. Drop the highlights CSV into Readwise's manual-import UI and they appear as orphan highlights attached to the source URL. Raindrop and Instapaper do not import highlights — you would re-create them in the new tool.

The permanent-library promise — Pocket's cached copy of the article text — was the most-broken Premium feature even before shutdown. Mozilla never extended that copy to the export. If you relied on Pocket to survive paywall and link rot, the answer in 2026 is the Wayback Machine. Cross-reference your CSV against https://web.archive.org/web/*/ for each domain you cared about and triage from there. It is slow. There is no shortcut.

Tags themselves transfer cleanly to Raindrop and Readwise Reader. Instapaper converts tags into folders, which usually means one item per folder if your tagging was fine-grained — workable for fewer than 50 tags, painful above that. (raindrop.io/pricing confirms tag preservation; instapaper.com/import documents the folder behavior.)