Mozilla shut Pocket down in July 2025. If you were one of the people who read the announcement, exported your library, and dropped the file into a downloads folder with every intention of dealing with it later — this is the later.
The good news is that the file is not a relic. Pocket exported in formats that predate it by decades and will outlive most of what replaced it. You do not need Pocket, or any Pocket-specific tool, to get your saves back.
Step 1: Work out which file you have
Pocket issued exports in two shapes, and which one you have decides nothing important — both work — but it helps to know what you are looking at.
- An HTML file. Open it in a browser and you will see a plain list of links under one or two headings, usually "Unread" and "Read Archive". This is the Netscape bookmark format.
- A CSV file. Open it in a spreadsheet and you will see columns named
title,url,time_added,tagsandstatus.
If you are not sure, or the file will not open cleanly in either, drop it into the bookmark converter. It detects the format from the contents rather than the file extension — which matters here, because Pocket exports arrive named .html regardless of what is inside them.
Step 2: Understand what survives
This is the part worth reading before you import anywhere, because it is much easier to split a file than to un-import one.
| Pocket field | What happens to it |
|---|---|
| Title and URL | Kept exactly. |
| Tags | Kept. Written as TAGS="a,b,c" in the HTML and a tags column in the CSV — both read. |
| Date saved | Kept. time_added is a Unix timestamp, and becomes the saved date. |
| Folders | Pocket had none. The HTML export’s "Unread" and "Read Archive" headings become folders. |
| Read / archived status | Dropped. No bookmark manager has an equivalent field. |
| Article text | Dropped. Pocket’s reader copies were never in the export. |
The last row is the one that catches people out. Pocket stored a readable copy of every article it saved, and that copy was never part of the export — what you have is a list of URLs. If a page has gone offline in the years since you saved it, the link is a headstone. This is a good argument for moving to something that archives a copy of the page at save time, so the next shutdown costs you nothing.
Step 3: Clean it before you import it
A Pocket library is usually a decade of one-click saves with no folder structure and no curation, because that was the entire point of Pocket. Importing it untouched into a new tool reproduces the mess in a new location and teaches you nothing.
Run the file through the bookmark cleaner first. It will group the duplicates — the same article saved from Twitter, from a newsletter and from search looks like three links and is one — and it will show you everything saved more than five years ago, which in a Pocket library is usually most of it. Both run entirely in your browser; the file is never uploaded.
Step 4: Import
Whatever you are moving to, check that it states it reads tags. A Pocket library without its tags is a list of a few thousand URLs in no order, which is materially less useful than what you started with. If you have not settled on a destination, what to look for in a Pocket replacement works through the criteria.
Open Data Transfer
In Inspistor, the import panel lives in the dashboard under Settings.
Drop the file in
HTML, CSV and JSON are all accepted, and the format is detected for you.
Read the preview before committing
You are told how many links, categories and tags were found before anything is written. If the tag count is zero and you expected tags, stop — you have the wrong file or the wrong export.
Import
Your Pocket headings become categories, your tags come across as tags, and every page gets archived on the way in.
The lesson worth taking from this
Pocket was fifteen years old, owned by a foundation, and free. None of that saved it. The thing that made this migration survivable was not the company — it was that the export was a plain text file in a format from 1994 that anything can read.
That is the only property worth insisting on in whatever you move to. Not that it will still be here in ten years, because nobody can promise that. Just that on the day it is not, you can get everything out in a file that something else will open.
Frequently asked questions
Can I still get my Pocket data?
Only if you exported it before the export window closed. Mozilla shut Pocket down in July 2025 and kept exports available for a few months after. If you have the file, everything below applies. If you do not, the data is gone — but check your downloads folder before concluding that, because a lot of people exported at the announcement and forgot.
What format is the Pocket export?
Either a Netscape bookmark HTML file — the same format every browser has exported since 1994 — or a CSV, depending on when and how you exported. Both are plain text, both are readable, and both are accepted by any importer worth using. Neither is a proprietary format that died with the app.
Will I keep my Pocket tags?
Yes, if the receiving tool reads them. Pocket wrote tags into the TAGS attribute on each link in the HTML export, and into a tags column in the CSV. Inspistor reads both. Some importers ignore tags entirely, which is worth checking before you commit a decade of saves to one.
Does my read/unread status survive?
No. The CSV export carries a status column marking each item unread or archived, and no bookmark manager has a field that means the same thing, so it is dropped on import. If that distinction matters to you, sort the CSV by status before importing and bring the two groups in as separate files, so they land in separate folders.