Yahoo! Mail taking new steps to combat spam
Hello everyone and welcome to 2008! With the first post of the New Year I have something that I’m sure will be especially interesting to many of you. I tracked down resident “Spam Czar” Mark (he leads the team that is in charge of our anti-spam efforts) and he had some exciting news to share. Check it out! (Please note that Mark is not really a Czar, but he is looking for tips on where he can pick up his own ushanka for the winter 
.)
Ryan K.
Community Manager
Yahoo! Mail
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We know you hate receiving spam in your mailbox, and we’re working hard to help. While there may always be bad guys trying to get their messages through to you, at Yahoo! we’re tightening up on our spam controls in ’08, and in fact we’ve already begun rolling out a significant new defense system (and it’s only January 4th!).
One reprehensible tactic spammers use is hijacking thousands of innocent home computers and forcing them to send out spam messages in the background, often without the owners even knowing! Collectively, these “zombie” computers spew out millions of spam messages a day, and that’s something that has to stop.
Starting today, we will be taking the bold move of rejecting mail from these zombie computers, using information from a number of third-party companies and ISPs to help in the identification. When these unauthorized computers attempt a connection to our back-end mail servers, they’ll be politely informed that their unsolicited mail is not welcome at Yahoo!. (This change is on the back-end only; users connecting through the Classic or All-New Yahoo! Mail web interfaces will not be affected blocked by this change.)