TECH: Yahoo and spam was Re: [CONLANG] The League of Lost Languages (was Re: Fakelangs)

Just another perspective...

On Wed, Jun 30, 2004 at 09:30:21PM +0200, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:

> So far, my experience with Yahoo! has always been negative.  [...]
> More problematic is that they apparently sell e-mail
> addresses of group members to spammers.  At least, it looks like that
> to me.  My mailbox used to be clean, but shortly after I subscribed
> to the yahoogroups mentioned above, I started receiving spam,
> fortunately only a trickle rarely exceeding three messages per day.
> I suspect that those spammers got my address from Yahoo!, given the
> close correlation between my yahoogroup subscription and the point
> of time the spammers "discovered" my address.
It is not my experience that this is so.  In fact, historically my email
addresses through which I received only Yahoogroups mail were the only
ones to remain completely spam-clean.  Granted, this is about the only
good thing I have to say about them.

Unfortunately, today's spammers are now gathering their email lists
directly from the address books and mail files of virus-compromised
PC's.  I get spam mail these days with the spoofed return addresses of
Conlang members, suggesting that some unknown third Conlang member's
PC has a virus which harvested both our addresses from the posts received.
I posit that it is likely you will be exposed to spam at any address
which you use to send email to any mailing list not composed exclusively
of hardcore Unix or Mac geeks (even softcore Unix mailing lists are not
immune to this harvesting, due to Linux enthusiasts who have not yet
transitioned off of reading mail on Microsoft boxes).

However, there are certainly reasons enough to preserve traditional,
non-Yahoogroups mailing list culture, and avoid their monopoly.

Amanda

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