How do I prevent Yahoo Groups from spamming me?

I hate spam too, but perhaps not quite as passionately as you do, if I may say so. I figure it's an inevitable side-effect of the Internet itself: it sure seems easy to make money, and the economies of scale are all messed up (where it costs as much to send a million untargeted messages as a dozen perfectly targeted ones), so we suffer through stupid pitches, lame product offerings, scammers and spammers.

Not that I like it, and not that I wouldn't be secretly in support of that death penalty for the most outrageous offenders, particularly when you take into account the hundreds of millions of dollars in wasted IT efforts and thousands of hours of time spent combating the problem. Heck, I pay over $100/yr for a commercial anti-spam solution to help tame my wild mailbox.

It's also ridiculous that the default setting in Yahoo Groups allows people to not only invite you to join their groups withint permission, but to actually add you to their new groups without your advance permission, letting you instead opt out after the fact. Stinks.

Fortunately you can turn it off.

Let's start at the beginning, though. Here's a typical message I was getting from a spammer tied to a Yahoo group:

Check especially the description of the group. Can't Yahoo just automatically trash these, since it's obvious that the lack of dictionary words in either the name or description are highly suspicious, to say the least...

Scroll down to the bottom of the message, though, don't just delete it:

There's the link you want: "Change your email preferences". Click on that scary complex URL and you'll find that there are some darn important email preferences in Yahoo Groups to adjust:

My suggestion is to uncheck both of these, then click on "Save Changes".

Oddly, this then takes you to another screen with the same exact set of options. As far as I can tell, you need to choose these yet again and save them yet again:

Wait a sec, though. I had to log in after all this to prove I had proper access to my account:

Finally, I am reminded that Yahoo Groups knows three addresses for me, and so I dutifully turn off these options for all three addresses:

Really, Yahoo, there's got to be a better, easier, faster way to do this...

But now you know. Go forth, change those preferences, and you should at least be able to control this small bit of your spam tsunami.