Yahoo mail users: is your spam filter freaking out?

Hi all,

I have had a few comments over the last week that I had not replied to some email sent to me. I finally looked in my "bulk email" folder and discovered that in with the 100s of spam email were a LOT of legit emails. Stuff from friends that's not even close to spam!

Any one else experience this? If you're not getting yahoo mail you should check your Bulk folder. I don't know what happened but legit email from as long as a week ago were affected for me.

~Hanford

My Yahoo filters have been doing this for a while.

The spammers are becoming more ingenious in finding ways to get their penis enlargement ads through the filters, and so the filters are becoming more and more strict... to the point where they are filtering out more legit mail than spam.

This is becoming a REAL problem.

It's starting to happen with my AOL Spam-filter also. I used to clear out the spam-folder regulary without even looking at the contents, but since a few of me eBay customers have complained about me not responding to their e-mails, I've begun checking it and, lo - quite a few legit e-mails mixed in!

I have not had a problem. My Yahoo spam filter has been working very well. I have a friend who forwards EVERY friggin' "feel good" email and those get sent into my bulk mail (thank God!) I'm also getting a large amount of virus attachments sent to me and those are all getting sent into my bulk mail.

Anyone else getting bombarded with spoofs with virus attachments?

[ Edited by: Atomic Cocktail on 2004-04-06 10:53 ]

Atomic,
I've had TONS of virus infected/large attachment e-mails coming to my work address. I've set up about 15 filters that filter out phrases such as Here is the file, Please have a look at the attached file, Please read the document, Delivered message is attached etc. I have it set up so that these are sent directly to a folder called 'virus' which I can revue and empty later on. When will this madness end??!! :-?

Yeah, my yahoo accounts do this as well as my hotmail account. I have to go through and select the emails that I want to be added to my "safe" list. Before I did this, the only emails coming through were from the names on my address list - so that meant that any mailer I signed up for on the internet and "new" friends emails would be sent straight to the bulk or junk mail folder.
It can be a real pain to wade through that stuff if you don't check it and empty it every day. Quite a hassle, but at least the majority of the crap emails get sent straight there.
As far as virus attachments - yeah, all the time. I got some that were RETURNED to me, which led me to believe my account was spamming other accounts, so I changed my password to something a little more difficult to decode and haven't received one since.

AOL recently began (without telling users) not taking any email that wasn't from an address in your address book. Lots of stuff going on.

One issue is this. Your email may be [email protected], but the spam filters look at the IP address in the header. Your ISP assigns you one randomly. If you happen to get a spam IP when you fire up the modem, your email gets marked as spam and will be blocked. Your email address may be good, it's you IP address that's marked as evil.

So it will be a continuing problem. Eventually, you'll get a bad IP. You will be seen as a spammer and your email will not go through. Hopefully, a good admin will send you an email telling you why and you can change it.

And here's the other thing. Even if you use Yahoo, or whatever mail, you IP goes into that email and gets it blocked. You may be able to use a friend's computer to email and then it gets sent.

So, the future means we will start having to get return certificates on all emails and making sure they really get sent and received.