Import your Pocket export into Bookmend

Install Bookmend free — no account, works on your existing Chrome bookmarks immediately

Pocket shut down in July 2025. If you exported your saves before Mozilla’s deadline, you have a file containing links you collected over years of saving. Getting those links into a usable state now means two things: moving them into Chrome’s bookmarks folder, and then checking how many of them are still alive. This post covers the exact steps for both, and explains how Bookmend fits into the process.

What Happened to Pocket

Mozilla shut down Pocket on July 8, 2025. The Pocket apps were pulled from app stores in May 2025, ahead of the service closure. After the shutdown date, Pocket operated in an export-only mode so users could download their saved data. Mozilla initially set October 8, 2025 as the export deadline, then extended it. All user data was permanently deleted in November 2025.

Pocket was a read-it-later service — it saved the full text of articles so you could read them later in a clean format, even offline. That functionality is gone. What remains for users who exported is a file containing the URLs of everything they saved over the years, along with titles, timestamps, and any tags or highlights they applied.

What the Pocket Export Contained

Pocket’s export was a ZIP archive containing one or more CSV files. Large collections were split across multiple CSV files at 10,000 saves each. The export also included a folder for any highlights or annotations. Some users may also have downloaded an HTML-format export, which follows the standard Netscape bookmark format that browsers can import directly.

Each saved item in the export has:

• The original URL
• The title of the page at the time it was saved
• A timestamp of when you saved it
• Tags you applied (if any)
• Your favorite/archive status

What the export does not contain is the full article text that Pocket stored for offline reading. That content was server-side and was deleted with the service. The export is a list of links — not a library of saved articles.

The Real Import Path: Chrome Bookmarks First

There is no separate Bookmend importer for Pocket files. Bookmend is not a bookmark manager — it is a repair tool for your Chrome bookmarks folder. It reads whatever is already in Chrome’s native bookmarks, adds full-text search, detects dead links, and recovers them via the Wayback Machine.

The path to using Bookmend with your Pocket saves is:

1. Get your Pocket links into Chrome’s bookmarks folder
2. Bookmend reads them automatically from that point forward

Step one is what requires attention. Step two requires no additional action on your part.

How to Import Pocket’s HTML Export into Chrome

If you have an HTML export file from Pocket, this is the most direct path. Chrome’s Bookmark Manager can import it in seconds.

1. Open the Bookmark Manager: Ctrl+Shift+O on Windows and Linux, Cmd+Shift+O on Mac
2. Click the three-dot menu in the top-right corner of the Bookmark Manager window
3. Select Import bookmarks
4. Select your Pocket HTML export file
5. Click Open

Chrome creates an “Imported” folder (or a folder named after the import source) and places all the imported bookmarks inside it. The import preserves titles and URLs. Once those links appear in your Chrome bookmarks folder, Bookmend can scan them alongside the rest of your collection.

What to Do If You Only Have the CSV Export

Chrome’s bookmark import does not accept CSV files. If your Pocket export contains only CSV files, you need to convert them to the Netscape HTML bookmark format before Chrome can import them.

Several free online tools can perform this conversion. Search for “CSV to bookmarks HTML converter” to find current options. The typical process is:

1. Upload or paste the contents of your Pocket CSV file
2. Map the columns (url, title, date) to the converter’s fields
3. Download the resulting bookmarks.html file
4. Import that HTML file into Chrome using the steps above

If your Pocket export was split across multiple CSV files due to a large collection size, convert and import each file separately. Chrome will place each import into its own folder.

After the conversion, the timestamp metadata may or may not be preserved depending on which converter you use. Timestamps affect one specific Bookmend behavior — it uses the save date to find the closest Wayback Machine snapshot when recovering dead links. If timestamp data is lost in conversion, Bookmend still detects dead links; it just has less precise date information for snapshot selection.

Once Your Pocket Links Are in Chrome

After the import, your Pocket links are regular Chrome bookmarks. Bookmend treats them identically to any other bookmark in your collection. No additional configuration, no import step inside Bookmend, no separate scanning trigger.

Bookmend’s full-text search immediately covers the imported bookmarks — searching the actual content of those pages, not just their titles. If a Pocket link is still alive, Bookmend indexes the content at that URL and makes it searchable by what the page says, not just what the title says.

For dead-link detection, Bookmend will check each imported URL as part of its regular scan cycle. Because Pocket saves can span many years, expect a higher-than-average dead-link rate in the imported collection.

What Bookmend Finds in Old Pocket Saves

Pocket was widely used from around 2010 through the mid-2020s. Links saved in that period have had a decade or more to break. The specific failure patterns are predictable:

Domain-level failures: Sites that existed in 2015 or 2018 may have since shut down, been acquired and redirected, or had their domains lapse. DNS failures and parked-domain results are common in older saves.

URL restructuring: News sites, blogs, and company websites regularly migrate to new platforms. The article you saved in 2019 may now exist on the same site but at a different URL. The original URL returns a 404 or redirects to the homepage.

Deleted content: Articles get taken down. Companies remove old product pages. Personal blogs go offline. Pocket’s pre-caching meant you still had the article text in Pocket even after the original went offline — but that cached text was deleted with the service. Now you have just the URL, and the original page is gone.

Bookmend’s two-check confirmation rule (each failed link is checked twice, 48 hours apart) means that the dead links it surfaces are confirmed failures rather than one-off server issues.

Recovering Dead Pocket Links via the Wayback Machine

For confirmed dead bookmarks, Bookmend queries the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) for the archived snapshot closest to the original save date. The Wayback Machine has been crawling the web since 1996 and holds hundreds of billions of snapshots. Many pages that are now dead have surviving archived copies.

The recovery process is:

1. Bookmend finds the Wayback Machine snapshot closest to when you saved the bookmark
2. It shows you the archived version of the page
3. You confirm whether this is the content you want to keep
4. Bookmend replaces the dead URL in your bookmarks with the archive.org URL

You control each replacement. If the archived snapshot is too old, captures an incomplete version of the page, or is simply not what you were looking for, you can skip it. If no snapshot exists at all, Bookmend tells you that directly.

For Pocket saves from popular news sites and large publications, Wayback Machine coverage is generally good. For personal blogs, small sites, or password-protected content, coverage is more variable.

Using Bookmend’s Full-Text Search on Your Pocket Archive

One of the things Pocket users valued was its search — you could find a saved article by searching the article’s content, not just its title. Chrome’s built-in bookmark search only covers titles and URLs.

Bookmend’s full-text search (available free) searches the actual content of every bookmarked page. Once your Pocket links are imported into Chrome and Bookmend has indexed them, you can search for any word or phrase that appeared in those articles. This gives you a search experience similar to what Pocket provided for its live saves, applied to whatever links in your Pocket archive are still alive.

What If You Missed the Export Deadline

If you did not export your Pocket data before Mozilla’s November 2025 deletion deadline, those saves are permanently gone. Mozilla’s servers no longer hold the data. The practical lesson for anyone using cloud-based bookmark or read-it-later services is to export your data periodically — a shutdown with 90 days’ notice is not unusual, but it catches users who simply never got around to exporting.

For future protection, Bookmend’s import/export in standard bookmarks.html format is always free on any tier. Your bookmarks stay in Chrome’s native format — an open standard that every major browser can read — and you can export them at any time without depending on any specific service remaining operational.

Getting Started

If you have your Pocket export and want to bring those links under Bookmend’s search and dead-link detection:

1. Import the HTML export into Chrome (or convert the CSV and then import)
2. Install Bookmend from the Chrome Web Store — one click, no account required
3. Bookmend reads your Chrome bookmarks immediately, including the newly imported Pocket links

There is no “import into Bookmend” step because Bookmend reads your Chrome bookmarks directly. The entire setup takes a few minutes, and from that point your Pocket archive is searchable, monitored for rot, and eligible for Wayback Machine recovery when links die.

Install Bookmend free from the Chrome Web Store — no account, no migration, works on everything already in your Chrome bookmarks folder.