Hey Yahoo! - Where did all my spam go?

I have two main email accounts. One is obviously for SpamButcher purposes. I manage the server that hosts all SpamButcher email directly. I have intentionally disabled any and all email filtering. I want to make sure I get the full dosage of spam. This way I can best evaluate how well SpamButcher itself can stop spam emails.

This account and several aliases for it are published directly on the web. The spambots have full access to it - and often it's readily apparent. Commonly I'll see the same spam message sent to info@spambutcher.com, sales@spambutcher.com and support@spambutcher.com within a few seconds.

This account has slowly built up from around 10 pieces of spam each day in 2002 to around 100 daily in 2007.

My other email account dates back to the late 90's. Like so many other users I was attracted to the "freeness" of Yahoo's webmail. By about 2001 it had built up to about 150 pieces of spam each day. By 2005 I was up to about 300 spam daily.

I had committed two sins with my Yahoo! account. For one, I'd signed up for various online "stuff" before I knew better. Second, I registered some domain names using it as a contact.

In the past it was possible for anyone to directly download databases containing internet domain info including registration contact email addresses. Spammers used this to their advantage and spammed the heck out of any address they found listed; knowing it was probably valid.

While I'm not positive when this happened - sometime in the last several months the amount of spam showing up in my Yahoo! account got mysteriously cut in half. I'm back down to around 150 a day or so.

The latest report on spam levels from SonicWall says that spam has significantly spiked in the last few months. I'm not sure how reliable that information is, but I haven't seen anyone else noticing a decline.

I've triple checked that all of my Yahoo! account's email filters were disabled. My bet is that there are additional filters that users can't turn on or off. It would seem likely that some change to these hidden filters is responsible for my drop in spam.

Many ISP's and other major email providers have taken to implementing some amount of filtration that can't be disabled by end users. I've seen at least one provider mandate the use of Greylisting and in some situations one or more DNS blacklists.

I understand Yahoo's motivation for doing this - I just wish they'd be more transparent regarding what their email filtering policy actually is.

Back