Spam-friendly policies by Yahoo.com necessitate total ban

Spam coming from Yahoo.com accounts has always been a problem – Yahoo's easy sign-up policies have made it attractive to spammers from the beginning and their sluggish response to abuse complaints has always been troublesome. But...

Recently Yahoo has taken steps to make it even more difficult to report spam, thus making Yahoo.com email accounts much more attractive to spammers: If recipients can't easily report spam, the spammer's account is much more likely to remain open.

Some time in 2010 Yahoo stopped accepting spam reports at the RFC-standard abuse address for their domain (abuse@yahoo.com) unless said reports were formatted in a specific format (tools for which are unavailable to normal Internet users); they specified that spam reports had to be sent only via a web page at http://abuse.yahoo.com/. Essentially farming out their abuse staff's workload to the spam recipients is inconsiderate and inconvenient, but at least it was possible for an average spam recipient to lodge a complaint and get a spammer shut down.

Then, in October 2011, Yahoo took the unprecedented step of making it impossible to file a spam complaint at all unless you have a Yahoo.com account. Yes, at this point you are not allowed to file a complaint about the spew from Yahoo.com unless you join up yourself! This is not only rude, arrogant and irresponsible, it virtually assures a big increase in the amount of spam coming from Yahoo.

This new policy makes it less likely for complaints to get through and therefore less likely for any Yahoo email account to get shut down for spamming. Thus Yahoo.com email addresses are now much more attractive to spammers.

At this point it no longer makes sense for us to accept any email at all from Yahoo.com. We encourage all Yahoo users to obtain free email access through more responsible providers like Mail.com. (Even Hotmail.com is now very good at accepting and acting on spam reports.)

Yahoo.Com listed as a spam domain at Berklix.org