2003 – 2012 archives supported
Your 2007 conversations,
back from the dead.
Drop in your old Yahoo! Messenger profile folder — or a zip of it — and browse every message exactly as it was. Works on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Decoded entirely in your browser — no upload, no account, nothing stored.
🔒 Files never leave your device · 💸 Free forever · 🗑️ Nothing stored
Completely private
Your files never leave your device. All parsing and decoding runs in your browser with zero server uploads.
Free forever
Static site. No accounts, no paywalls, no upsells. The whole thing is open source.
Nothing stored
Close the tab and it's gone. No cookies, no tracking, no database. We literally can't see your messages.
Here's what you'll see
A clean chat view, emoticons rendered as emoji, buzzes as buzzes, and all your old profile pictures in one place.
How it works
Three steps. No server involved. You can open your browser's Network tab and watch zero requests go out with your data.
Point us at your archive
Drag in a folder (profiles1, profiles2, or whatever you named it), a parent folder containing several of those, or a .zip. The browser reads it — nothing is uploaded anywhere.
Decoded in your browser
We parse the .dat files and reverse Yahoo's XOR scheme right on your device. Everything happens locally in JavaScript.
Browse your chats
Every conversation, every buzz, every smiley. Search, filter by date, and scroll through years of history.
Questions people actually ask
▸Which Yahoo! Messenger versions are supported?
Any version that wrote the classic .dat archive format — roughly 2003 through 2012. If your folder has a Messenger username subfolder with an Archive/Messages/ inside, you're good.
▸Where did these files originally live?
On the Windows machine you used back then, they lived at C:\Program Files\Yahoo!\Messenger\Profiles\ (sometimes under Program Files (x86)). If you've since copied them to a Mac, an external drive, iCloud, or a stack of DVDs — no problem. Just point the viewer at whichever folder you kept, by any name.
▸Do I have to name the folder "Profiles"?
No. The viewer anchors on the Archive/Messages/ structure, not the outer folder name. profiles1, profiles2, backup_2007, old_chats — all fine. You can even drop a parent folder that contains several of these side-by-side and we'll merge them.
▸Does this work on a Mac?
Yes. The viewer runs in any modern browser — Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, on macOS, Windows, or Linux. The original Yahoo! Messenger was a Windows app, but you don't need Windows to browse the archive it left behind.
▸Is this really private?
Yes. All parsing, XOR decryption, and rendering happens in JavaScript on your device. The site is a static bundle — there's no backend. Open your browser's Network tab and you'll see zero outgoing requests with your data.
▸What if my archive has multiple profiles?
No problem — every profile folder gets its own account in the sidebar. Switch between them freely. If you opened snapshots from two different backups (say profiles1 and profiles2) that happened to contain the same profile, duplicate messages are removed automatically.
▸Why do some of my filenames look truncated?
Older Windows copies sometimes hit the long-path limit and truncated filenames when zipping. The viewer matches files by folder structure, not exact names, so this still works.
▸Can I see images I shared?
Unfortunately no — Yahoo! never actually stored sent images in the archive, only a marker that a transfer happened. You'll see a 📎 placeholder where images used to be.