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."
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...)
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.
Hint: People are deliberately signing up for MoveOn lists, then flagging it as spam.
This is not news - it's a pretty well-known competitive dirty trick.
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.
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?!