Apparently, Yahoo laid off their email abuse staff, because the company now responds to forwarded email with full headers to abuse@yahoo.com with a notice that “abuse reports are only accepted in Mail Abuse Reporting Format.” Someone on the Internet actually tried to make a script that would format email messages into the correct format, following the guidelines in the RFC for MARF, and all attempts were rejected by Yahoo’s servers.
In other words, Yahoo no longer accepts reports of email abuse. Notably, I have seen a sharp uptick in the amount of spam reaching my spam folder from @yahoo.com addresses, and now there is no way to report such abuse. It may be time to blacklist all yahoo.com email and whitelist addresses I know are good. Word in my shop is that Yahoo has been self-destructing for a while now and this is probably just the latest incarnation of the hellfire that Yahoo will become if it remains on the current path.
Where is the leadership?
Thanks for the info. That explains why my Spam folder is always loaded.
Seconded… I can’t find any info on their website. Only a CAPTCHA protected “copy your spam email headers here” and “copy the contents here” crap… No… why can’t you properly parse an email?
I realize email is still a relatively new technology… ya know, hasn’t been around for 20 years… Oh. Wait.
Sadly, I have seen the same rise. I am wondering if legit messages from flickr (one of Yahoo!’s services) would be affected by a general blacklist of all of yahoo’s outbound mail servers.
Just blacklisting @yahoo addresses won’t be enough, as they permit some account holders to send mail using their own domain names. Domain names which might be @btinternet, @gmail and other valid addresses.
I have just had the same problem. There is no standard easy way to submit fraudulent emails that come from yahoo users.
I have had problems with yahoo for a while, but they have always accepted feedback. The company will not be viable for much longer.
I give them inside a year before they are acquired if they don’t do a turn around.
Which makes more sense, having the programmers at Yahoo cook up a quick script to parse forwarded emails in to the correct “Abuse Reporting Format” or making each person who gets spammed do it manually?
Got a spam from a site hosted at Yahoo and forwarded it to their abuse address along with spam@uce.gov since it was obviously a phishing scam. I’m not all that willing to go through the effort of filling out their forms if they’re not willing to put in the effort to make it easy.
Ban ’em.
I am completely fed up with crap from Yahoo. For the last several years they’ve been on the top of my spam lists (at least ignoring those commercial hosting services that seem to be the ‘go to’ guys for spammers — and with whom I’m sure we’re all familiar), and in the last couple months the percentage of spam from them has managed to creep within a hair’s breadth of 100%. Last week, all message delivery attempts, every single one, from Yahoo IPs were spam.
Other free email providers DO NOT have this problem. Google is relatively clean. So is Hotmail, and both of them accept abuse reports. Why doesn’t Yahoo accept abuse reports? The easiest answer is because they don’t care, don’t want to hear about it, and can’t be bothered to do anything about it. Their servers are getting raped by spammers and and the rest of the Internet suffers for it. Yet clearly Yahoo’s problem is solvable since it’s not a problem suffered by other providers, but doing anything about it would take at least some modicum of interest or initiative.
Thankfully, folks are starting to notice not only the deluge of spam from Yahoo networks, and notice not just the staggering arrogance and indifference of the Yahoo admins & executives who close their eyes and plug their ears to the problem, but also that scant few legitimate messages seem to come from Yahoo domains.
My personal take is that Yahoo, much like AOL, has outlived its usefulness but has too much inertia to just flop over dead. Like a fat man careening down a steep hill out of control on a bicycle, the process is as unpleasant as the outcome is inevitable. There’s nothing the rest of us can do besides take cover and stay out of the way.