Tips for “Knocking Out” Spam

If you use email, and judging by the fact that you are reading a Mail blog there is a good chance you do, you have no doubt had run-ins with the dreaded Spammers. If you don’t know, spammers are either trying to bury you in some sort of marketing/sales avalanche, or could be trying to trick you into providing personal or account information (that they would then use for nefarious goals). Either way it is good to learn ways that can help to “knock-out” Spam, and below are some useful tips from our team.

• Report spam using the Spam Button
  • The fastest and best way to report suspected Spam is to highlight the message and click the Spam button within Yahoo! Mail. We always strive to stamp out new tactics as quickly as we can. Clicking this button immediately alerts our systems and engineers to a new spam tactic, so the more reliably you click the button, the better we can tune SpamGuard to ensure you don’t get messages like this again.
• Give out your email address sparingly
  • You should only share your email address with individuals and companies you trust.
• Don’t post your email address in public places (message boards, chat rooms)
  • Spammers mine for email addresses all over the internet, so if you post your email address publicly there is a good chance they will find it.
  • If you absolutely must share your email address you may want to try replacing @ with <at>. Spammers can still find the address, but at least it won’t be as easy for their scraping tools. For example, if your address were jethro.jones@yahoo.com, you might post it as jethro.jones<at>yahoo.com. This helps block scripts that are scanning for the “@” symbol.
• Customize your spam settings
  • Check your SpamGuard setting, enable image blocking
• Use a Disposable Email Address for shopping
  • Avoid using your primary email address on various shopping sites. One solution is Yahoo! AddressGuard which allows you to create disposable email addresses. It is attached to your Yahoo! Mail account, but if Spam starts rolling in you can delete it (without impacting your primary address) and simply create a new one.
  • AddressGuard is available for Mail Plus subscribers, but comes bundled with SpamGuard Plus (featuring some Bayesian technology I can’t even hope to explain).
• Read the fine print
  • Be mindful of what you opt-in and out of when asked to receive other offers and information.

Now if one of those nefariously intended spam messages still gets through, a common tactic used to obtain your account information is to direct you to a fake login page. If you are ever directed to login to a Yahoo! sign in page there is a great feature that can help you make sure that you are logging into a legit one (whether Mail or any other Yahoo! website), and it is called Yahoo! Sign-In Seal.

When signing into a Yahoo! page you may have seen the folded down corner encouraging you to Prevent Password Theft. Clicking there gives you the option to create a short text phrase, or personalized image, that will appear anytime you login to a Yahoo! web page from that machine. That means that if you click on a link and land on a Yahoo! sign-in page without your designated “seal” it probably isn’t authentic.

Once again, this applies only to computers you have completed the Yahoo! Sign-In Seal process on. So if you set-up a seal on your home computer, you will have to repeat the process on your work computer. On my home computer I have the contemplative picture you saw in my introductory blog post, but as you can see to the left I have used a picture of me at a baseball game for my work computer (first comment that correctly identifies which MLB stadium gets a prize!).