I’m getting so pissed off with how useless Yahoo’s spam filter is. Oh, and I won’t even consider adding an exclamation mark every time I write Yahoo – fucking wankers. I have both Gmail and Yahoo email accounts and the difference between their spam filters is staggering.
Gmail hardly lets any spam through but every day I have to wade through spam in my Yahoo inbox. And it isn’t even cleverly designed spam. It is absolutely bog-standard Nigerian 419 scams and messages telling me I’ve won the Irish lottery. And even when I mark something as spam an identical message gets through later in the day.
And the clueless feebs at Yahoo wonder why Google is kicking their arse from one end of the internet to the other. This is the absolute basics of spam management and Yahoo is failing miserably.
On a slightly related note, I had a funny experience with what I guess I could call phone spam. I’ve published the number for the angry phone far and wide (0403 069 148) and received a few interesting calls. Yesterday I received one from a chap saying he was calling from Ghana. He was apparently feeling hard done by and was assured I was a generous and caring person. He then proceeded to recite one of the standard spam scripts that Yahoo is so useless at blocking.
I said straight away that I knew the call was a scam and I wasn’t going to give him any money or any of my personal details. But he was not easily dissuaded and wanted to keep telling me about how I was the only one who could help him with his desperate plight. At first I thought I’d see how long I could keep him on the line and so cost him money but I soon realised from the low sound quality he was calling via voice over IP. So no chance of sending him broke.
I really wish I had a camera running and was able to record the whole thing because there was quite a comical element to it. My African phone spammer had managed to call just after I had put some dye in my hair. Because of this, I couldn’t put the phone right up to my ear or it would have been covered in dye. This, of course, mad it hard to hear him. Plus he had a really thick accent.
So he’s doggedly ploughing through his script and I keep interjecting with “Dude, I can’t hear you. Or understand you. And I wouldn’t give you any money if I could.” All the while holding the phone daintily away from my ear to avoid colouring it purple.
Sad to say, it was the highlight of my day.
Angry 365 Days a Year 
Salamaat Angry,
“All the while holding the phone daintily away” made me laugh out loud! I receive much fewer personal emails that a sometimes Nigerian spam is an amusing diversion. On the phone though? That’s new and scary!
“much fewer personal emails” sounds really off…oh well, you get what I am trying to say (I hope.) In essence, I really need a life 🙂
my solution was to open a gmail account just so i could pop my yahoo account – gmail is my spam filter!
I tell you what’s worse than an obvious scam, is when the scammer doesn’t know that they’re beat. As my land-line number is in the white pages, I get telemarketing calls fairly often. They usually go something like this:
He: “Hi, I’m calling from We Screw You Inc. Do you have a few minutes?”
Me: “No. I’m busy.”
He: “I said, ‘I’m calling from –”
Me: “Yeah, I heard. You didn’t. I’m busy, but too polite to slam the phone down.”
He: “Oh… errm…” *click*
Me: “But you’re not, apparently.”
What’s worse is that they assume that I didn’t understand them because they’re Indian, rather than actually listening to what I said. Frustrating bastards 😦
And this is why I use Gmail…
LOL
Dagnabbit, though, here I was thinking Ghana was a safe haven from these scamming feebs. But I guess it’s also a relatively poor country, and where theres a need, there’s a scam…
But the funny thing is, some of these Nigerian scammers are pretty persistent. And incredibly dumb. I think I saw one site where a guy had convinced the scammer send in a picture of himself with his laptop swinging from the family jewels as proof of his honesty.
I was certifiably impressed. Needless to say, in spite of that brave effort, he didn’t get the money, and probably isn’t going to have any children soon either…
phyreblade, Google for 419 Eater and Scambaiter; those are the sites you will have seen it on.
I agree 100%. After much frustration (caused by Yahoo “misplacing” my domain registration a while back), I actually managed to speak to some one fairly high up on the feeding chain at Yahoo. The subject of spam email came up and I pointed out that I didn’t have the option of deleting/changing my heavily spammed account because, it was the original account associated with my domain. Drop the email and I lose my whole website.
Anyway… I point out to this Exec that 90% of the spam email is dated in the future… as far ahead as the year 2038. I said, why don’t you just block everything that is dated more than a week or two ahead of time. Think of the billions of emails that Yahoo would no longer have to hold on its servers.
And this way I’d at least have a fighting chance of actually finding a legitimate email that made it into the bulk folder by accident. Right now, to find an email from this week I have to click, page by page, through hundreds of “forward-dated” spam.
Guys, just set up a date filter and Yahoo will probably cut out 2/3 of the commercial spam.
Medivh,
Three Jehovah Witnesses came to my door several days ago, asking me if I have some free time. I said: “Sorry, I have no time right now, because I am a satanist and it’s time for my regular human sacrifices, so I’m on my way to find a victim, but if anyone of you is interested in becoming a martyr…”
Did you see this?
http://www.419eater.com/html/joe_eboh.htm
A hilarious story of a guy who persuaded a Nigerian spammer to send HIM some money, not mentioning doing other interesting things 🙂
Does anyone know how to make sure if an email sent to Yahoo won’t be passed into spam folder?? I’m working on a website, and this issue really make me confused because every email we sent to our customers (which use Yahoo mail) were passed into the spam folder (in fact they’re not spams nor promotion emails)
You forget the best part about yahoos useless spam filter. The false positives! Who even knows how many emails I was supposed to get that were randomly lost in my spam folder. Yahoo doesn’t let to search the spam folder (why the hell not? Wouldn’t that take about 5 seconds of SQL coding to pull off?) so the only way to check is to manually scroll through every single message in the spam folder and try to spot legitimate emails.
Of course, I can’t really do this. But as consolation I can click on one of the 40 messages for horny farm girls that make it through to my inbox today.
Dude you know u shld put like a disclaimer on your site stating that ALL Nigerians are NOT scammers…its not cool when u sound off like that.
~
I have gmail and I love it
I hate yahoo spam filter for the exact opposite reason they are too tough now. I have a my several different and brand new URLS that have hardly been used and never spammed with and every time I send emails to people they get put in the yahoo spam. Its the only email that happens to. fucking hate yahoo.
I believe that Yahoo is in bed with the spammers. Just look at some of them and how easily they could be filtered out by any basic spam filter. Plus Yahoo took the ability to delete Spam immediately so you tend to delete the Spam every time you open you email and they hope that you will look at a few of them. It is so obvious that Yahoo is allowing them to come thru…
912 e-mails in my inbox. All spam. If it wasn’t for having two services tied to my Yahoo account I would have stopped using it all together. Went to outlook.com and very little spam
I have 4K e-mails in my inbox. 99% are spam. This is the reason I dumped Yahoo. I use Yahoo when some site wants my email for something and I know that they will spam me, ie Insurances companies.