Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo Blocks Venerable Email List Over False Positives
RomulusNR writes "Yahoo has stopped delivering This Is True, Randy Cassingham's 14-year-old mailing list, because too many Yahoo readers have mistakenly or carelessly flagged it as spam. Yahoo readers make up over 10% of True's readership, slashing the ad revenue that keeps it going. And Yahoo doesn't negotiate with spammers. As Randy describes it: 'The yahoos... ask to be put on True's distribution, then confirm that request, and... then click the "This is Spam" button when they don't recognize the mailing or simply don't want it anymore. Yes, those yahoos have screwed thousands upon thousands of others who really do want my newsletter. Too bad: Yahoo is listening to the yahoos instead: they're blocking it. To them, we're "spammers" and no protestations from "spammers" count.' The irony is that This is True is one of the first profitable mailing lists, predating Yahoo! Mail by almost three years."
I'm all the time clicking "this is spam" on stuff that Yahoo sends to my yahoo account, but I still get it. What's up with that?
The person being hurt is the mailing list owner, who isn't a customer of Yahoo. The Yahoo subscribers, who marked it as spam will be quite happy, they're no longer receiving this email they forgot subscribing to. The remaining Yahoo subscribers may or may not notice they ceased receiving it. Many will assume that the mailing list has closed all together.
So I don't see any market pressure to force Yahoo's hand. Other than what little publicity the mailing list owner can generate.
the REAL story here is ... "How do I poison the yahoo spam list to ignore email from large, legitimate companies?" ... because it seems to be working well by accident. Maybe someone could monetize this? (Of course, that makes it a denial of service attack, and probably not legal... but...)
When somebody subscribes to one of my mailing lists, and confirms, we need a token from the mailbox provider which, when included on an incoming email means that the email is NEVER spam. Spam reports get converted into unsubscribe requests.
But there's no standard for this.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
.
Why can gmail (my new free email provider) do such a better job than Yahoo did?
Isn't Yahoo in an ideal position to make this sort of probing useless? Just redirect all non-existent traffic with an unsubscribe header to a daemon that requests to be unsubscribed... then if you keep getting mail, you either ignore it or you use it, since you have the largest pool of honeypot email addresses on the planet.
Likewise they could in theory hit unsubscribe on behalf of their customers and then grab the resultant traffic. Of course, this is more open to attack, as the attacker can just switch email addresses. But if you're also unsubscribing all non-existent traffic, I'd say this will actually begin to get a lot more expensive for the would-be spammer than Yahoo, and the spammer would just stop trying to brute-force Yahoo.
As someone who's been on Randy's list for 10+ years, I can tell you it's easier to remove yourself from his list than anything else. It's literally just one click to unsubscribe.
In fact, it's easier to get off his list than it is to get on.
Some people do pay for the upgraded "Premium" This is True, and those people are not getting a paid-for-service.
What if yahoo decided that announcements from /. were spam? What if you were a subscriber?
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I stopped using Yahoo about 4-5 years ago because of problems with inbox delivery. After many tests, their mail servers would respond that the message was Sent when in fact it was never delivered. I've tested it about 20-30 times since then and have the same issues. Even if you send mail from supposedly vanity domains like Gmail.com, the mail still never gets delivered. Yahoo has had problems before with the profiles.yahoo.com site getting infiltrated by spammers about 5-7 years ago, a problem they never solved. It seems like the problems don't go away -- they only get worse. This story is just one example.
I run a relatively small (2,000 subscribers) email discussion list for hardware store owners. I'm signed up as a mailing list provider with AOL's mail system, and I receive notifications when subscribers submit my list messages as spam. Apparently AOL's DELETE and REPORT AS SPAM buttons are relatively close together, though I can't verify this. I do know that I get notifications from AOL that a user has reported a message as spam, and when I contact the user they tell me it was a mistake and they didn't realize they had reported the message as spam.
My guess is that you have to reach a fairly high "critical mass" of spam reports before AOL will actually take action and block list messages. I've never had my list blocked by AOL (or Yahoo for that matter) so the occasional erroneous report doesn't seem to have much effect.
I wonder if Yahoo has a similar program for mailing list admins?
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Yea... only if it's 1 guy.
120,000 subscribers probably means 5% paid, 95% unpaid: so a 1 year signup is $24, then 6000 * $24 = $144,000 per year, plus ad revenue, let's use a conservative 2.5% email click-thru and another 2.5% ad CPA (and averaging a 50 cent CPC), 1 email per user per week: 115,000*0.01 = 28,750 clicks * 7,187 * 0.50 ~= $3500 per month (approx), about $186k gross per year. There's probably additional banner click revenue, but his site is sure to be low-volume, negligible profit there.
So.. he's probably pulling about $175-200k a year (give or take, but I'd be surprised if it was more than $250k), but consider you need to subtract ISP costs of about $1k a month, lawyer & accountant fees, advertising costs, which usually runs very high, maybe 30% (conservative since I've seen ad costs up to 50-75%), he's probably clearing $100k to $150k per year. Not much left over to hire a secretary. Very small time operation.
Camping on quad since 1996.
Because you're an ass. I've used the mark spam bit, too, but only for emails for which the unsubscribe link is neither present in the email, nor apparent on the website. In my view, if they obscure or don't even have a way for me to stop receiving emails, they become spam the moment I no longer desire to receive them.
Because I'm also an ass. Although slightly less of one.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Some years ago I subscribed to an IBM mailing list, just to see if anything interesting was on it. My subscribe e-mail had a link to the unsubscribe page on a server, all later e-mails didn't. That already isn't a very good way of doing it. Last month I wanted to get rid of it, searched for my first e-mail, followed the link, 404 error. By being so sloppy with their mailing list practices, there is no better way then using the "this is spam" link.
Other example: my Gmail address is apparently very equal to the ones of some philippinan users and I get many subscribe e-mails and invites to mailing list that are popular in that community. Of course I never confirm those things, but in the case of Multiply "Secure and family friendly social networking", I got not only signed up without having to confirm, I also had no way to unsubscribe, and got all of a sudden a lot of e-mail from that multiply user's friends. I had it forwarded to the spambox. Then after a while, I got the mail from the "forgot password" button, and out of curiosity found that I could indeed log in with this. These are pretty amazingly bad internet practices, I contacted the site owner and actually got a reply back, apparently they had deliberately chosen to have users be able to log in for the first few weeks without them having to confirm their e-mail address. Web 2.0: the same mistakes all over again, but with new paint.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling