Good For You Yahoo

13 Jul 2007 19:37 (Edited: 13 Jul 2007 19:37)

Lately I've been getting a lot of email from scammers and it's really been pissing me off. I'm used to ending up on a bunch of mailing lists, and I used to spend at least 10 minutes every morning removing my name from them. To their credit, most of the list admins take this at least seriously enough for this to be worth my time.

However, it seems that one of my email addresses has apparently been put on some sort of list used by one or more scammers. After simply deleting the emails for a couple of weeks, like most people would do, I got mad. Why should I have to spend my precious time deleting their crap every single day?

Since the majority of the scams I've been emailed about seem to have return addresses from Yahoo, with a few other major email providers as either the source of those emails or return addresses for others, I decided to start reporting them. Starting at the end of last week I've been forwarding the emails, which commonly have return addresses from either Yahoo Hong Kong or Yahoo UK to abuse@yahoo.com. If you're not familiar with this process, most email services of any size, including those from ISPs have an address of abuse@wherever.com that you can send these emails to for action.

To Yahoo's credit, not only have they sent me an automated message when they receive my forwarded emails, but also a message from the employee who's dealing with it in their office. This usually takes around 48 hours, which is reasonable given the amount of email they must receive. Although the emails have been sent from non-Yahoo accounts, the Yahoo reps have assured me each time that since the return addresses appear to be Yahoo accounts used in ways that violate their terms of service they'll be dealt with appropriately. The first 2 of these I received I took with a grain of salt and tested sending emails to the accounts. Both times the emails were returned as undeliverable.

I highly recommend dealing with scammers this way. If they're going to make you spend your time dealing with their crap, the least you can do in return is make as much of their illegal and immoral income difficult to get to as possible.

Tags: 419  abuse  scam  yahoo 

List of my blog entries

• Are They Obsolete? (23 Jul 2007)
• Corporate Arrogance (09 Jul 2007)
• The Right To Make Money (08 Jul 2007)
• My New Toy (02 Jan 2007)
• Once More Unto The Breach (17 Dec 2006)
• Shifting Into High Gear (07 Dec 2006)
• On The Home Stretch (27 Nov 2006)
• All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy (22 Nov 2006)
• Just Like A Bad Check (20 Nov 2006)
• I Quit! (04 Jan 2006)
• Happy Happy Joy Joy (12 Dec 2005)
• First Entry (12 Dec 2005)

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