Yahoo spam protection needs tweaking

Yahoo likes to talk
a lot about its oh-so-cool tools to fight spam, but just how effective are they? I
have a yahoo ID that I use only for instant messenger chatting. Of course it has
its own mail account too which I stopped using a few years ago. Of late,
however, Yahoo has started letting a lot of obvious spam through its
"protection".

Don’t believe me? Here’s a screenshot of my in-box the last time I checked
mail on the yahoo account.

yahoo screenshot

Apart from the first one which was legit mail (I’ve blurred it), the other
messages are clearly spam. They aren’t even the more deceptive ones that have
benign subject lines like "hello", "how are you doing", or
"I forgot to tell you".

Yet Yahoo fails to classify them as spam. They need to tweak their algorithm
a bit, I suppose.

(And before somebody asks, yes, the "SpamGuard" option is
enabled on my account. I checked twice.)

25 thoughts to “Yahoo spam protection needs tweaking”

  1. well, as you use the account only for IM use, you might have given out the email id to a lot of sites for registration purposes. If you guard your id from such sites, you hardly ever receive spam. Many people now have an id just for this purpose (which incidently, is the id they use just for IM).
    It is true, however that a decent email filter should weed out all such msgs.

  2. I get the same garbage in my yahoo account. I stated suspecting that most of these spam filtering efforts are not being maintained like they used to. I’m using Earthlink’s spamBlocker, which requires senders to authenticate if I don’t pre-authorize them. It’s a pain sometimes, but works.

  3. <aol>Me too</aol>. On the other hand, my Hotmail address gets something like 3 pieces of junk a day, all caught by the junk mail filter, despite being used for domain registrations.
    And don’t even get me started on the bloat in Yahoo Messenger… 🙁

  4. I’m using the Yahoo for some years.. it’s really gud in filtering SPAM.. once in a week i get some spam into my INBOX.. rest all goes to Bulk Mail.. Did u enable Bulk Mail option?

  5. Satish, I wrote the last line of my blog entry just for you. 🙂
    Prasenjeet, Yahoo messenger is so bloated that it just starts eating more and more system resources. Check the “GDI Objects” in Task Manager. It’s a hog and a half.

  6. I agree with Madman. Yahoo definately needs to improve this. And so is the case with Rediff. They even have a system of reporting the email to so called administration as spam.
    I created an account and sent out contents copied from an email classified as spamm many times. To my surprise, it still delivers in Inbox.
    I think its high time now email systems also start with something like Captcha

  7. I get 50 spams per day on Yahoo, but only 1-2 end up in my inbox.
    Strangely enough, this morning, “Laptop Giveaway” and “soulmate” emails landed in my junk mailbox on yahoo, and not in the inbox like your case.

  8. I have abandoned my yahoo mail account long ago. It is practically unusable for quite a while due to the amount of spam I receive there. Besides, having my own dedicated server means that I dont use free mail accounts much nowadays. I however use Gmail frequently to check mail problems on my server.
    My guess of the inefficiency of Yahoo is the fact that it expects its users to train their own personal spam filter. So to have effective spam control, you need to log in regularly and train their filter by reporting spam. Those who use Yahoo regularly and report spam faithfully, have told me that Yahoo anti-spam works for them.

  9. hi mm,
    me a firstie visitor to ur page…needless to say blown over by the template…
    ya yahoo mail spam filter is slowly loosing sheen…but somehow i find myself not deleting them….call it the perils of having 250mb storage space…
    hiyaa me too from bangalroe
    sathya

  10. Well then I wonder why I do not get any spam in my Yahoo inbox! Nearly all of it gets routed to the Bulk Mail folder. Sometimes a solitary mail does escape the filters and land in the inbox, but thats perhaps one in 2-3 days. Here I can see that you’re getting about 6-7 spam mails daily in the inbox!
    You think maybe it has something to do with the filters not being upgraded promptly on some mirrors?

  11. Again late but, my $0.2! OK, quite jobless today…
    I NEVER get junk in yahoo! Some spam yes. Hotmail is another story tho’ 🙁 But then my hotmail id is the one e.one has, so guess its not just me, its my *friends* who help me attract that fluff.
    Every morning I have to perform the daily ritual of sweeping through my accounts- ugh! it sounds as horrible as it is. Wish I were smarter to able to get it all in one place, but then as you say, it may crash and I be cold turkeying all day! Fell for your silly trap- was so keen to write and finally click on that link below to increase the size of the box, hahaha!

  12. I have to opposite problem with Yahoo’s Spam Protection. It keeps putting “friends” into the Spam folder, even though I repeatedly mark the Emails as “not spam”. I’ll get that one message, but then the next week it’ll block again. It makes me have to examine my Spam (bulk) folder on a daily basis. I might as well turn it off.
    S

  13. I have gmail and no spam gets through. I get around around 150 spams a day. Nothing goes into my inbox

  14. Even with SpamGuard enabled and filters in place (which are user-hostile to setup), Yahoo still lets in incredible amounts of spam, and yet…wait for it…sends legitimate messages to the spam folder. It’s even worse than Hotmail USED to be, before Microsoft finally did something right with it.
    It isn’t just Yahoo mail – Groups, 360, Messenger, and Personals all show serious signs of neglect or just plain “we-don’t-give-a-rat’s-ass” attitude on the part of their programmers.
    I hope and pray that Yahoo either gets back in the game, or gets off the field and lets Google or Microsoft buy them out.

  15. I have arrived to the opposite conclusion: yahoo protects the spam much more that it does with what they consider regular email. I think that someway they’re making big money with spam and thay don’t want to end with it.
    Just make this experiment: go to the spam box and delete one of them, what happens? A window opens asking if you’re sure that you want to delete that spam!! Now go to the regular inbox and do the same with any of the received mails: suprise!!! no window protects you from deleting them. Isn’t it curious??? Come on, Yahoo, I know what’s your business!!!!

  16. I have gmail too, but it’s awful((( all my life I’ve been working with google and was quite satisfied. recently I changed my job and was “introduced” to yahoo…what can I say…if it wasn’t for http://rapid4me.com search engine from which I usually download helpful soft and books that save me much time and efforts, I’d probably gone mad by now. no offence to yahoo fans, I’m just a bit disappointed by all those innovations

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