Yahoo mail was never great, but in just the past few months it’s gone from bad to flat-out fuckin’ useless.
Spam unfiltered litters my inbox. And yet, e-mails from friends and family and business colleagues that used to arrive unhindered are now–of a sudden–spam-filtered to a “Bulk” box so stuffed it’s impossible to look through.
My friend sent me three e-mails, important ones too. I even suspected that they were coming to me–I even searched a bunch in “Bulk.” No dice, never arrived, never seen by me.
False positives are a pain in the ass but, so long as they don’t number above twenty or so per day, I can live with them.
These new false negatives, however, mean I can’t use the account any more. Yahoo mail is dead to me.
Interesting. I don’t have a problem with them. I don’t get a lot of spam (probably less than 1 a day), so when something ends up in my bulk folder, it’s easy enough to check and make sure it’s not legitimate.
Do you have your friend’s email listed as a contact?
At any rate, I hate to piss all over your rant by asking questions and shit, because maybe you just hate Yahoo Mail and wanted to rant without some internet idiot coming in to pick it all apart :D. Which is fine by me. If that’s the case, carry on…
I’ve had a Yahoo Mail account since 1998 or 1999 (can’t remember which) and it has always worked very well for me. I use it for everything except personal communications and I get very little spam, with what spam I do get always being directed to my bulk folder.
I have had a Yahoo mail account for 8 years. For me the spam filter works great. I get over 1000 pieces of spam each month and only one or two get in my regular in box.
I use my Yahoo address for any transactions that might generate spam so I don’t ruin my real address.
The mail from my paid internet service, in the other hand, filters nothing.
I used to use Yahoo as my primary address (for about 4 years) until Gmail came out. By that time, I was getting quite a bit of spam, and decided it’d be swell to keep my primary email address spam free, and started using my yahoo account as a spam dump. Currently, my bulk mail folder has 2062 emails in it, and it looks like I get close to 50 new spam mails a day, with one or two leaking through the filter and into my regular inbox. It’s weird, though, because everytime one slips past, I mark it as spam, but whatever filter they use never really improves. Aren’t those things supposed to learn?
They do learn, of course, but as I understand it, they do so by pooling the input from all users, so your contribution is a statistical drop in the bucket.
Yahoo mail user since 98, use it for almost everything but business. Just checked my bulk folder - over 6000. I think they clear it after 30 days, so that’s 200 a day. Probably get 2 or 3 spams a day into my inbox, so can’t say that’s too bad. I will admit that in past years, I’d get maybe one spam a month into my inbox, so the spammers are “improving” a little bit.
I don’t check my bulk folder for real emails very often, but I think I’ve only once seen one.
About a year and a half ago, my yahoo account got locked up for a few days, that was traumatic. Never realized till then how much I depend on Yahoo!
Never could get used to gmail’s interface, I do use it for some things.
Another yahoo mail user. For the most part the spam filter works great. Every now and then spam slips past it, and I just mark it as spam and go on. Even rarer is the case where it identifies real mail as spam.
But I scan my spam bucket every now and then anyway, because I’m looking for good titles to submit to the “Spamusement” guy, and occasionally to use myself to post funnies in the Spamusement Guest Comics forum. FWIW, I have spotted exactly two good emails sitting in my spam bucket over the last year.
I have three yahoo mail accounts that I have labeled throw-away, name, and daily.
Throw-away is the account I use when I have to provide an email account name to get info from various legit and shady sources. I’ll give that address to anybody who asks for it. Name is Bubba’sRealName@yahoo.com. I give that one as a contact for my internet purchases Daily is the account attached to my yahoo home page. I only provide that to friends. I also use a gmail account that is strictly business use.
My system works pretty well. My Throw-away account is crammed with spam inside and outside of the bulk folder. Don’t Care. Name gets a lot of adds from Circuit City, Ticketmaster, and a host of others I don’t care about. And my Daily account stays happily uncluttered.
I have one yahoo and one hotmail, and I use it pretty much the same way. I have simply abandoned 3 junk mail accounts and created new ones beceause the spam became pretty bad after a while. No pain there.
The reason the OP is getting so much spam is that they are using their email to sign up for crap. The spammers didn’t just come upon the addy by guessing, they bought a list. Even appearingly legit companies sell their lists. Those folks sell their lists to others, and soon you are on hundreds of lists.
Even worse, maybe the OP decided that they were receiving some spam mistakenly, and clicked on the link to unsubscribe. If you do that, the spammer now has a CONFIRMED email address, which he can sell for more than he gets for the unconfirmed ones. Those lists are more in demand, and get picked up quickly. Soon you are on even more lists.
Or maybe, Bubbadog has his email on his website. There are software programs that simply surf the web all day looking for emails. There are a lot of folks doing that, and you can get on a lot of lists quickly.
All e-mail clients have some issues with spam–I don’t get much in my inbox anymore (thank you hotmail) but I do have to check my junk-mail periodically for legit mail that gets sent there by mistake–I get little mail so that happens rarely but I’ve had to add both one of my professors and a classmate (both using school e-mail addresses) to my safe list, because they were getting filtered as spam. Fortunately, I’m not receiving a lot of spam either–the only reason filtering is even on for me is because Hotmail did it on it’s own, I was getting that little.
I’ve tried the junk e-mail account thing before–I can’t be bothered to keep up with more than one account. Heck, I can’t even be bothered to check my school account, and that’s with a professor who refuses to use my Hotmail address.
Yahoo had a golden age there for a while but has sunk into darkness recently. About a month ago I started receiving spam from legit sounding first and last names with really odd subject lines, ie, “Sublime anorexia couch.” I have been completely inundated with that.
I’ve had my primary (netcom) email account since I got online about eight years ago. I was tormented by spam until I started using SpamBlocker. Now most spam is automatically deleted. Spam that gets through is easy to delete (and report). People have to be on my list to email me, and I can see those in my suspect email folder.
I’ve had a yahoo mail account for a few months. I decided I needed a more ‘professional’ email address for résumés and such. To date, the only ‘spam’ I’ve received has been a couple mass-mailings from people who found my address through my monster.com account. (‘Hello, Jobseeker! We have an opportunuty…’) Those are rare, though. I think I’ve received three. Of course I don’t give that address to anyone.
I also have a hotmail account I set up for my late mother. Never use that one. I’m a little miffed at hotmail because of the many, many hotmail addresses that show up in my SpamBlocker.