Ian Lipsky

I have fairly low expectations from the free email services and from ISP's when it comes to doing anything about a user on their system that is spamming. But I think yahoo sinks to new lows. I would not be surprised in the least if every report of abuse is just dumped in the trash (after sending out a nice auto reply assuring you they'll do something).

I've reported several yahoo users to yahoo abuse and as far as I can tell, they have done nothing. I know for a fact in one particularly nasty case they did nothing.

I run a bulletin board and I try very hard to keep all the spammers off of it. And like most boards, I require people to validate their email address before they can post. So I know for a fact if someone registers with a @yahoo.com email address, and then posts spam, that that email address is sending spam.

One day someone registered, validated their yahoo email address and started posting spam to my board advertising their crap - printer cartridges if i remember correctly. They posted a link back to their store which was a yahoo store, and which had the same email address on the store's page as the email that was used to register on my board.

So I sent an email to yahoo abuse informing them one of their customers were spamming bulletin boards. I showed them a copy of the post. Explained how the email was validated. And I sent a copy of this complaint email to the spammer as well. I like them to know that at least some people actual report them.

The spammer responded by sending several hundred emails to my mailbox. I reported this to yahoo as well, including copies of the email with full headers.

Yahoo did nothing. The spammer's email was still operational. The spammer's store was still operational. This pattern is repeated over and over by yahoo.

So it is my opinion that yahoo sucks. Yahoo doesn't care what it's users do, especially if those users are paying yahoo.