Tips for “Knocking Out” Spam
- Posted August 24th, 2007 at 9:43 am by Ryan
- Categories: General, Tips & Tutorials
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!).
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- 60 Comments
August 24th, 2007 at 10:28 am
Really great article. Thanks Ryan!
Now when is there going to be an update for Y! Mail Beta?!?
August 24th, 2007 at 10:32 am
Not all of these tips work. I’ve set my spamguard to automatically delete spam, Then it goes to my inbox. From there, i click spam and that means i get the same spam-mail with multiple email address senders(Thanks Yahoo) Spam should be outlawed like unsolicited phone calls.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:56 am
Yeah this happens to me too when I set spamguard to automatically delete spam and and it go to my inbox too and i get the same spam over and over again and even more thanks yahoo… I think yahoo should get their heads pull out of there butts and fix this this sucks going back to gmail.
August 24th, 2007 at 11:07 am
WHEN WILL WE SEE MORE OF THIS KIND OF STUFF?
I’VE USED YAHOO FOR 3 YEAR’S
AND I WILL NEVER GO BACK TO OUTLOOK EXPRESS, AGAIN.
August 24th, 2007 at 11:15 am
Is the stadium in Philadelphia? Just trying to win that prize you know!
August 24th, 2007 at 11:22 am
I think it is Jacobs Field. I like the reminders about spam and nefarious characters that have no life except to ruin others.
August 24th, 2007 at 11:22 am
Hi Jim,
Nope…not Veterans Stadium or Citizens Bank ballpark.
Jerry,
Not Jacobs Field either
RyanK
August 24th, 2007 at 11:38 am
The ball park is the famed Fenway. A beautiful place for a ballgame and that comes as a non Red Sox fan.
August 24th, 2007 at 11:47 am
Good article.
Is that Turners Field by any chance?
MT
August 24th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
Good Stuff.
Would be nice to see an option to move mail to a quarentine folder, if the incoming address is not in contacts and not processed by a filter.
AddressGuard is nice, but not thrilled it requires mail plus.
Keep up the good work.
August 24th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
It would be great if we could block email according to info in the subject line. If I blocked “urgent”, “prize” and a handful of others, I would cut my spam by 2/3.
August 24th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Well done Charlie…it is Fenway. I had the pleasure of visiting many parks during a trip in 2004, and Fenway was by far the best experience! I’ll shoot you an email with a request for delivery information.
-RyanK
August 24th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Just be sure that “prize” isn’t in the subject line…
August 24th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
seems to me that the spammers might be using the address guard, is this possible? once their address is marked as spam they just change it out with a new one. I think there should be no email messages without a ligtimate email address or am I just confused? And by the way I get a lot of spam with the yahoo.com on the end!
August 24th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
I have been getting more spam over the last few months about viagra, sex, loans, etc than I ever have before. It was like they figured out a way to circumvent the bulk mail and spam settings over night. Has anyone else noticed this recently? At work we can set up the mail so that e-mails with certain words will automatically be sent to the trash, like what JeeferyP said in his comment. I never see these messages. Can Yahoo do this? Please?
August 24th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
I would love to be able to send the spam messages back to the sender…. it would be great to think about their computers getting jammed up with returned mail
August 25th, 2007 at 2:15 am
Yahoo mail is faster and whenever required can be operative. More tips to spams to be blocked shall be posted from time to time.
Raghuveer.
August 25th, 2007 at 4:12 am
there use to be a chat room so you could talk to persons in other countries, I cannot find it now. Is it still in yahoo and if so would you tell me where it is?
August 25th, 2007 at 4:14 am
[…] tells you how to fight SPAM The Yahoo! Mail Blog tells you a few methods on fighting spam in Yahoo! […]
August 25th, 2007 at 4:14 am
Is there an easy way to clear out all of your blocked addresses? Mine is at the 500 max hopefully those spammers have given up & I can add others.
August 25th, 2007 at 7:43 am
I have installed the Yahoo Sign-In Seal many times on my computer. Every couple of days , or so, it goes away and asks me to install it again. What causes this. Why do I have to keeping installing it once I have completed it?? Thanks.
August 25th, 2007 at 8:04 am
My yahoo account always got some spam — a couple a day, maybe 10/20 a week at most - but in the last few months I’ve been getting maybe 80-100 a day. Since last night I got 86 - 84 in my spam folder, 2 in my inbox [ even though they were obviously spam ].
My hotmail account always got most of the spam [ yahoo should copy their black/white lists ] now it’s Yahoo. I only use this account for banking,purchases etc so I’m not giving it out to mailing lists or websites …. Please do something about this growing problem….
About the sign-in seal going away …. if you dump cookies the information will be deleted.
August 25th, 2007 at 10:11 am
Thank you for the info Ryan. I recently switched back to yahoo, after using hotmail for many years, and I couldn’t be happier with the spam filters on my yahoo mail. I am sorry I stayed with hotmail for so long! Thanks again.
August 25th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Spam guard works for me and those mails simply go to my bulk box which I delete whenever I log on. Thank you yahoo for such a feature (and others that I enjoy).
August 25th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
is it Kansas City Rouals stadium?
August 25th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
my mail frezes up about 4 to 5 time when i try to use it .I have to shut down and restart
help
August 25th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
Sure would be nice to get rid of Spam on Beta Mail….but since I still can’t get it to load, can’t use it. Gives me some sort of error that’s three or four lines long. I’ve sent a help request to Yahoo more than once…still being ignored. So, hope everyone that has switched to Beta likes it…I tried it for a while switched back and wanted to try it again. It just won’t let me. And yes, Yahoo, I empty my cache files DAILY. So stop suggesting that is the problem.
August 26th, 2007 at 4:01 am
I get hundreds of spam every day. Is there any way to have anyone in my address book go to one folder and other go to another? There are not enough rules to set all my addresses up that way. In other words, can I set up a white list. All non-white listed mail would go to a folder of my choice so I could scan it for potentially good mail and move them. And I use the Beta and love it!
Is that Fenway Park?
August 26th, 2007 at 7:54 am
Spam on the rise once again in my inbox. Have tons of filters, and today when I turned on PC..14 emails overnight, 9 of which were spam. In the bulk folder?—2. Um…ok.
August 26th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
I got a spam e-mail with a from address of my own e-mail address!! How can this be, and how can I make sure someone hasn’t hijacked my e-mail address?
August 26th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
coors field ?
I hate spam on the web
I hate spam in a can
either way I hate it….says Sam I am
August 26th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
Is it Yankee Statium?
August 27th, 2007 at 4:01 am
I like music
August 27th, 2007 at 5:20 am
I have to agree with Dick Evans, a white list service would be great! I only need to receive e-mail from those in my contacts list.
August 27th, 2007 at 5:21 am
I had no problem with spam until I clicked on an ad about walmart gift card at top of yahoo mail page. SCAM…just want your info and for you to buy something. Dumb I know, but why does yahoo allow these marketing sleaze balls on their system? My mail is also freezing up several times each week. Sometimes I can end program in task manager window but other times I have to restart computer. When I’m able to end the program vs restart computer, I send error report that pops up on screen. This Problem started after I began receiving spam and after I downloaded Explorer 7 for windows…both events happened around same time. Could the Explorer 7 be the problem or even the spam? I never open the spam…just delete it.
August 27th, 2007 at 5:32 am
Of the three major web based email systems, Yahoo has the worst track record for blocking spam. If you want a competitive advantage, spend some money on a real spam blocker and not the cheesy excuse for one you use now. Maybe Yahoo doesn’t want to spend the money on a good spam blocker. Too bad, because if you snooze you lose.
August 27th, 2007 at 6:41 am
How can I get rid of all the emails that should not be sent to people who do not want it. I spam all of them, but these people have so many others working for them, it doesn’t help. This morning I got one from a child pornographer and I spammed it. I hope they don’t have other people working for them. Is there someone or some agency I can write to that will stop all this filth.
August 27th, 2007 at 6:47 am
I will like to have a spam in my yahoo mail
August 27th, 2007 at 7:14 am
I am disappointed with Yahoo’s spam filtering. Years ago, it used to work. Now it doesn’t. It’s so bad that I can’t really use yahoo mail as my main email anymore.
August 27th, 2007 at 8:45 am
I am also receiving tons of email spam from my own Yahoo email addresses to include my Yahoo website email links and website address. And since I have it sent to my Outlook - I’m not always able to filter it. Actually am getting up to hundreds of spam daily. Many that are coming from my website “Submit Comment”.
“I got a spam e-mail with a from address of my own e-mail address!! How can this be, and how can I make sure someone hasn’t hijacked my e-mail address?
August 29th, 2007 at 3:23 am
Why doesn’t Yahoo use a spam guard that requires my permission to accept email from the sender (like earthlink and others do?) Thus only email from people I give permission to accept gets through to my inbox.
August 30th, 2007 at 1:53 am
I’ve always been extremely careful about giving out my email address and used to get maybe 5-7 spam a week. Then I switched to the (in my opinion horrible) Yahoo mail “beta” - where now I get up to 30-40 per DAY…
Sure, 90 percent of them go into the Spam folder, but then so do some of my legit email.
I’ve been using yahoo as my main account for almost 9 years, but am seriously considering switching - it’s gone completely downhill in the past year.
August 31st, 2007 at 11:26 am
Is pressing the SPAM button safe?
I know it sounds like an odd question, but in one of my many roles in life to keep the lights on and the Harley payments made, I published a newsletter that was delivered by bulk email to opted in subscribers.
I would get a report from the vendor we used to deliver the newsletter that included who opend the publication and when, as well as other metrics of value.
Along with the the data regarding opened email, we also got a count of those who marked the newsletter as SPAM. There was no information on who marked it, but it didn’t seem to me to be a big leap to harvest that information, therfore proving to an illigitimate mailer, a SPAMMER if you will, that the email address was “alive” or still a good address.
So … IS clicking the SPAM button safe?
Thanks!
Don Bailey
PS: Great piece by the way!
September 3rd, 2007 at 2:33 pm
Its gotta be Safeco Field
September 20th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
This is happening to me also. I Made a WHOIS search to the web adress that was in the emails and they all give a adress in Shangai. They wanted to sell watchs and drugs. The different domains are all registered in the same name and adress person. Telephone and adress!!!
We Hope that somebody from yahoo is reading this and trying to prevent it. The emails go into the junk-field maybe because they are detected by a filter that recognizes the spam web.adress… but we do not know if there are other people receiving this emails as they where going out from my adress and I hate that idea!
***”I got a spam e-mail with a from address of my own e-mail address!! How can this be, and how can I make sure someone hasn’t hijacked my e-mail address?”***
September 30th, 2007 at 3:02 am
Fernando,
This has been happening to me as well. The same emails with my name as sender, also for watches and drugs. I aso traced the headers and it too was the chinese company with the jibberish name. I made another name on my yahoo account - example john.smith@yahoo.com. I used it yesterday for the first time in months, and half a day later there is email “to and from me” with BOTH yahoo addresses on the same account. I did send the legit emails to some people who also had yahoo accounts. Coincidence??? I use AVG for virus, getting updates every day. I use gmail and a personal domain and do NOT have this problem - only with yahoo. I’ve had the yahoo address for 7 years and was happy until recently. Thanks for any help.
October 15th, 2007 at 11:09 pm
i want to see my yahoo e mail
December 2nd, 2007 at 7:23 am
In all the years with Yahoo,have never seen there mail so bad. Cannot at all,as much as we all try,also from what we understand,hundreds of people,properl use the functions on anything ,etc. Delete, new, … at all. Bad, bad, bad yahoo. I just changed to the wonderful G-mail, cannot efford to lose my clients in contacts. BK Dec. 2nd. 2007, again very bad service in what you have caused us.
December 5th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
HELP!! I accidentally checked “new Mail” and I can’t lose the damn thing!!! DON’T WANT IT! I want OLD MAIL SYSTEM BACK!! YAHOO PLEASE CONTACT MY E-MAIL ASAP!!!!
December 21st, 2007 at 4:19 am
please help i’ve been locked out of my e-mail, do not know the answer ro the secret question…
start counting?????
how many caraters do i need ?
August 27th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
I can’t send e-mail It keeps saving failure notice. Why I sure would like to know as it makes me very very angry
December 23rd, 2007 at 10:14 am
I’ve been trying to get into my mail since getting my new Mac Leopard, but for some reason Yahoo will not let me get past my ID and password. Have even opened a new account but the same thing happens??????????????
December 27th, 2007 at 9:11 am
i want to change back to mail classic the new beta suxs will not let me delete e-mail.or change back,even though it said i could change back anytime whats up..
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:39 pm
why do some text disappear and not appear unless you highlight the word. In my replies, and in my sent file, there are some words that are not there unless you highlight the apparent empty space where they should be. How do I stop this from happening…
February 7th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
PLEASE HELP!!!!!!
I HAVE FORGOTTEN THE SECRET ANSWER I GAVE TO YAHOO ABOUT 4 YEARS AGO AND CANNOT GET MY PASSWORD ( WICH I CANNOT REMEMBER). I CHANGED IT A FEW DAYS AGO, I’M DESPERED TO GET IT BACK OR BE SENT A NEW ONE, BUT I HAVE SO MUCH INFORMATION AND MAILS FROM AGENCIES, THIS IS TRULY IMPORTANT FOR ME, PLEASE I NEED ASSISTANCE!!!!
THANK YOU SO MUCH!
March 9th, 2008 at 8:11 am
Hello everybody, I am a guy who is not computer literate and here is what I need. In E-Mail there are choices of fonts, sizes, and colors and I would like to know how can I lock into a setting of my choice so that I do not need to set the font, size, and color each time that I use the E-Mail.
Thanks
Hank
June 3rd, 2008 at 6:30 am
The legitimate emails from my company racy.com are going into the spam folders of our customers with yahoo mail addresses.
How do I stop that from happening?
We are a good company that sends very few emails, but some of our customers aren’t getting our order confirmation emails because yahoo mail has deemed them spam. How do I fix this?
June 10th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
For the past 24 months I’ve been receiving daily spam, yahoo and gmail addresses seem to be the main culprits, is there anybody I can report these senders to.
June 26th, 2008 at 4:54 am
I have been getting a lot of mail from fanmail, or so and so want’s to be your fan.. this is all a ruse to get you roped into SPAM. How do we keep these jerks out of our in box.. and where did they come from?
August 26th, 2008 at 10:04 am
hello yahoo staffs nothing is permanent