Your Pocket export file, and what you can still do with it

The file is called ril_export.html, and it has probably sat untouched in your Downloads folder since some time in 2025. RIL stands for Read It Later, Pocket's name before Mozilla bought it. Everything Pocket held for you is in that one file, and it is plain enough to read yourself without installing anything.

What it is not is a copy of the articles, and that distinction decides what you can realistically do next.

What is ril_export.html, really?

It is a web page. Double-click it and your browser shows every link you saved, under two headings: Unread first, then Read Archive. No import, no account, no waiting.

Underneath, each save is a single line of HTML carrying four things: the address, the title Pocket recorded for it, the date you saved it written as a Unix timestamp (a long number counting seconds since 1970), and a tags attribute holding any tags you added. That is the entire record. There is no article text, no screenshot and no preview image, so if a page has gone offline since you saved it, the file tells you what you saved and when, and nothing more. That is not a fault in the export. It is what a list of links has always been.

One thing worth knowing before you touch it: this is not the format browsers use. A browser export is a Netscape bookmark file, an older shape with its own header and nested folders. Pocket's looks similar at a glance and is not the same thing, so tools built strictly around the browser format may read it badly or not at all.

How do you open and read your own file?

Do this first. It takes a minute and it tells you what you are holding.

1. Double-click the file. It opens in your default browser as an ordinary page. Scroll it. The Unread section is everything you never got to; Read Archive is what you finished.
2. Press Command-F and search it. The browser's own find works on the titles, which is usually enough to answer the only question you had: whether a particular thing is still in there.
3. Open it in TextEdit to see the raw record. Right-click the file, choose Open With, then TextEdit. You will see the timestamps and tags that the browser view hides. Nothing here can be broken by looking.
4. Copy it somewhere safe before you do anything else. This is the only copy in existence. Pocket cannot send you another one. Put it in a folder you back up, not just Downloads.

What if you never exported anything?

Then it is gone, and there is no gentle version of that. Mozilla announced the shutdown in May 2025: signups and renewals stopped on 22 May, the app itself stopped working on 8 July, and saves could be exported until a deadline after which the data would be permanently deleted. That deadline moved once, and the window finally closed in November 2025. Accounts have been deleted since, and there is no archive to write to and no recovery route.

If that is you, take the lesson rather than the loss. Whatever you pick next, run its export on day one. An export you have never run is a feature you are trusting rather than a file you own. The wider question of what replaces Pocket is worth a read on its own.

Where can the file go?

Several places take it, and two of them cost nothing, so start there rather than with anything you have to pay for.

Raindrop, free. Raindrop's own import documentation lists Pocket among its verified sources and says plainly to export as an HTML file. Its free tier is unlimited bookmarks, so uploading your file costs nothing. Pro at $34 a year raises the upload allowance and adds the archiving and search extras.

Instapaper, free tier. Instapaper is the closest surviving thing to what Pocket did, and it built a page specifically for Pocket refugees. You get a genuine reading view with the clutter stripped out, which no library app here offers. Premium is $59.99 a year for full-text search and permanent archiving; saving and syncing are free.

Karakeep, free and self-hosted. If you are comfortable running software on your own machine or a server you rent, Karakeep is open source and its import documentation covers both the HTML file and the zipped CSV that Mozilla mailed out during the wind-down. It costs nothing beyond whatever you run it on, and it is also the most work.

Nowhere, deliberately. Leaving the file where it is remains a legitimate answer. It is small, it is plain text, and it will very likely still open in twenty years. If you only want the option of finding an old link one day, you already have that.

How does it go into Muse, and what should you expect?

From version 1.0.21 Muse reads the file properly. Pocket is named in Settings under Import, in the import grid you see when you first open the app, and in the file chooser itself, and behind that name is an importer written for Pocket's own format rather than a bookmark importer being made to cope. Earlier versions did not have this, so if your copy shows no Pocket option, update first.

Use the File menu, not a drag. Choose File, then Import Bookmarks, then pick your ril_export.html. The same button sits in Settings under Import and Export. Dragging the file onto the window is the wrong route: Muse only recognises a dropped HTML file as a bookmarks export when it carries the browser format's header, and Pocket's does not, so it would be filed as a document rather than read as a list.

Here is what to expect once it runs. Your links and their titles come through, and so do the save dates, so a page you kept in 2019 still says 2019 rather than today. Unread and Read Archive arrive as two separate collections, so the pile you meant to read stays apart from the pile you finished. Tags come across too, including items carrying several. Accents, ampersands and quote marks in titles survive intact. Anything that is not a web address is refused rather than imported as a broken row. It is still worth comparing the count Muse reports against the number of links in the file.

Muse then fetches a preview image for each link, so a saved page becomes something you recognise on sight rather than another line of blue text. That needs a network connection and some patience on a large file, and any page that has since gone offline comes back with nothing, because Muse does not archive pages. A meaningful share of any old saved list is already dead, and no import undoes that.

If what Mozilla sent you was a zip of CSV files rather than the HTML file, use that instead. Muse reads a CSV too, and a CSV carries the save dates in a form it recognises, so you keep the years your saves are spread across rather than collapsing them all into today.

Muse covers a different job from Pocket. It has no reading view, does not strip ads, and does not keep the text of an article. If your list was a reading queue, Instapaper above is the better answer and pretending otherwise would waste your money. Muse is for the other half of what most Pocket lists held: things saved to look at again rather than read again, a layout worth remembering, a product page, a page kept because it was interesting. Those arrive as pictures in a library on your own Mac, filed alongside the screenshots already on it.

Muse needs an Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 14 Sonoma or later. It is $29 once, after a 30-day trial that unlocks everything and asks for no card. When the trial ends the app locks, and export keeps working, so an imported library can always be taken back out.