Comments on: Is Yahoo Now Even Worse On Spam?

By: The Trouble With Big Webmail | Software Cooperative News

The Trouble With Big Webmail | Software Cooperative News — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 07:45:36 +0000

[...] other main point in my argument was that free webmails are unreliable, thanks to tactics like Yahoo’s shoddy anti-spam attacks on other mailservers. There’s no telling whether the email will get through such bad behaviour and [...]

By: Spam Revenge: Stopping Joe-job Floods in qmail | Software Cooperative News

Spam Revenge: Stopping Joe-job Floods in qmail | Software Cooperative News — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 13:31:46 +0000

[...] a small discussion has broken out in the comments of Is Yahoo Now Even Worse On Spam? about whitelisting and business-critical uses of free webmails. [...]

By: MJ Ray

MJ Ray — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:53:28 +0000

All of the big unpaid webmails have problems. You can’t control your customers and volunteers, but you can gently point out that the reason you haven’t seen their email is partly a result of their actions. If we don’t educate customers, they might not realise why they’re having a bad time with email.

I don’t make a special exception any more for UK customers of telcos like BT who are using Yahoo. They should change telco. I have more sympathy for customers of Yahoo-using telcos in places where you can’t switch (so much for a competitive market in telco service).

Amen to the lament about spammers winning. I’d love to work on solving this, but I’m not sure that’s possible with email as we currently know it.

By: Ambrose

Ambrose — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:13:29 +0000

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.

By: MJ Ray

MJ Ray — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:44:10 +0000

Oh and if anyone uses Yahoo for important work email, they’re foolish and in for a world of pain from the dodgy vigilante tactics described in the original article above, so please let’s not use that as an example.

By: MJ Ray

MJ Ray — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:41:52 +0000

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.

By: Ambrose

Ambrose — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 15:04:43 +0000

That’s because in practice it won’t work. How would that supposed to work if your Yahoo address is used for work purposes? Ignore all your potential clients? Ignore everyone who happen to have sent you things from the “wrong account”?

Even for personal communications it won’t work. Ignore messages from mailing lists you subscribe to (first-time confirmation messages always come from a different address so the first post always come from an “unknown” address)? Ignore replies from your mobile phone provider (they always ask you to fill in a web form but reply by email so their address is always “unknown”)? You might as well cancel your email account.

It is precisely this (thinking that “receiving email only from known addresses”) that the spammers want: Complete destruction of email as a useful means of communications.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 04:27:43 +0000

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.

By: Would Debian Lists Send Scunthorpe to Coventry? | Software Cooperative News

Would Debian Lists Send Scunthorpe to Coventry? | Software Cooperative News — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 07:53:26 +0000

[...] least it got through eventually. If only Yahoo was as responsive as debian [...]

By: MJ Ray

MJ Ray — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 17:42:15 +0000

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.