Is Yahoo Now Even Worse On Spam?

Yahoo had never been good on spams, no matter which way you look at it. On my Yahoo account, close to 100% of what I get is spam.

But this is really not a Yahoo problem, but much more systemic (or maybe I should say endemic): Just about everyone except us small admins has lost any common sense of how email actually works. You can see Google doing random IP blocks without giving you any reason (or logs, when you ask for them), Yahoo silently blocking Google, and medium-sized providers putting on questionable RBL lists for their own use. In short, it’s a real mess out there in email world.

FWIW, I would say the spammers have already won. I have always thought that destruction of email as a communications medium—not selling stuff—is their ultimate true goal, and if what I think is right on track, they have already accomplished their true goal.

Despite all of the above, I still get useful communication by email, thanks in part to whitelists and scoring. However, it is increasingly unreliable and it is a source of stress when users don’t realise how unreliable it is. It also doesn’t help when telephone lines aren’t working correctly either and a certain user’s office software is also corrupting things… but that’s another story, maybe.

Just a note of interest. I notice no one seems to want to discuss the obvious option here. Train users that they should set up their email accounts to only accept email from known addresses, the same way we set up accounts for our kids.

I agree to a degree. I prioritise emails from known addresses and put spam-like things into a once-a-day folder, but I still look at them all. Once there’s enough of them together, it’s usually pretty obvious to me which are spam repeats and which are ham, but I do very occasionally miss a work email. Email isn’t a guaranteed reliable service though, so senders need to be prepared for that and chase up unconfirmed emails if they’re important.

The question of whether “anyone uses Yahoo for important work email” is “foolish” or not as straightforward as you think. There are large telco providers here that provides email service but uses Yahoo in disguise, so you might not even know you are using Yahoo (even if you agree that using Yahoo is foolish), and you can’t control your customers/clients (lots of our customers/volunteers use Yahoo…)

Besides, this is not only a problem with Yahoo. I have a small but significant number of serious problems with Gmail already, and some corporate email systems also behave in stupid ways (random blocking, or sending your mail to /dev/null, for example). I would say that between corporate and “free” email systems, as well as between various “free” email systems, and to some degree even between corporate systems, email is no longer reliably interoperable. The spammers have already won; we have already lost, and to a certain degree we have helped them won.