Prior to Yahoo Groups’ final closure in 2020, many groups exported member lists or message archives as .txt files. Some mirrors remained on university or archive.org servers, indexed with yahoo.com references.
: Limits results to pages or files containing this specific domain. -gmail.com -hotmail.com : The minus sign ( yahoo.com -gmail.com -hotmail.com Txt 2022
https://web.archive.org/web/2022/*/http://yahoo.com/*.txt Prior to Yahoo Groups’ final closure in 2020,
Open Source Intelligence analysts use queries like this to find exposed lists of user data. By filtering out the massive volume of Gmail and Hotmail users, investigators can pinpoint niche targets or specific demographics utilizing Yahoo mailboxes in 2022. 2. Investigating Data Leaks and Breaches -gmail
The inclusion of "2022" is particularly interesting. Following the massive Yahoo data breaches of the mid-2010s, a significant amount of Yahoo-related data circulated through the "gray web." By 2022, much of this data had been cleaned, sorted, and repackaged into the very .txt files this search query targets. Security Implications
Fast-forward to 2022, and we can see that the popularity of these email services has waxed and waned. According to recent statistics, Gmail.com is the most popular email service, with over 1.5 billion active users. Yahoo.com has around 200 million active users, while Hotmail.com has around 150 million active users.
The reason these .txt files are visible to search engines in the first place comes down to misconfigured web servers.