In the early days of the Internet, back when we called it a “dirt road” and were delighted when email bounced from UUCP connection to UUCP connection as is slowly wound its way from one end of the topological jungle to the other, email mailing lists were quite the cool thing.
Years have passed and we now have sophisticated web-based discussion boards, blogs and many other venues for interpersonal interaction, but email remains, to me, the killer application, and it’s on my mailing lists that I encounter the freshest thinking and most valuable information.
I can remember when there were two main places to find mailing lists too (other than the List of Lists and other short-lived directories), Topica and Yahoo Groups. Google’s added its own collection — of course — with Google Groups too, but in many ways, Yahoo Groups was always my favorite place to look for people with similar interests.
Which is why it’s so distressing to see that it’s become an absolute safe haven for porn and spammers in ways that were unanticipated when Web-based lists were first envisioned…
Rather than just talk about it, let me show you a group invitation I just received:
Clearly this violates the terms of service of Yahoo Groups (at least, I certainly hope it does) but I find it fascinating that I get a lot of spam from many sources, but Yahoo Groups is the only Web-based mailing list management service that has started delivering this sort of junk to my mailbox. And this isn’t the first. I’d estimate that I get two or three of these every week that creep through my spam filter, and indeed, you can imagine that even Google’s Gmail service has a tough time differentiating a spammy or porn Yahoo group invitation from a legitimate group invitation, so it’s pretty sneaky/smart on the part of the spammers.
Sure, I can ostensibly report this group invitation to Yahoo, but they are unlikely to take action against these spammers, and if they do, will it do any good anyway?
Have you seen any porn or spam invitations of this nature, and what’s your opinion of this intrusion into what I certainly still view as one of the pearls of the Internet community?
I joined a Yahoo! Group under the guise that it was a financial group. The owner has sent me explicit messages multiple times (& each time I’ve responded, asking it to stop & to be removed from the group… to no avail). I run 2 of my own groups on here, but I am seriously considering closing them both & possibly even my email account. I figured I would simply report the group, but I can’t find anywhere to send a complaint like this TO???! This is beyond annoying… uuuuugh!!!
Yech. And if you click on the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the emails related to the group, you still can’t quit that bad group? Or is it that the owner now sends you email outside of the Yahoo Groups context? In both cases, you should also be able to set up your email to block or reject their email automatically. Good luck!
Shame on you, “Rich R”.
Tactics like yours guarantee that I will never even CONSIDER visiting the site you mentioned in your spam post (not going to mention the name of the site again).
As anon@12:54 already mentioned, it’s sincerely gross to post spam to a thread focused on the problem of spam.
Yahoo is probably making money from the spammers. That’s probably why they don’t do anything about at. They might even be behind it all.
It’s not the adult stuff that’s the bigger problem IMO. In recent years, many groups on Yahoo! (nay, almost all if not all in fact), if they don’t require approval, get innundated by those useless messages. It’s sad because it shows that no one will likely come back to groups like this, and the only good things are what’s there besides messages.
Getting it in my mail is not an issue however because I always set messages to “web only”.
I totally fault Yahoo! for this. One of my customers routinely receives messages from a Yahoo! group that he did not subscribe to that are of a pornographic nature, and despite complaints to Yahoo! and unsubscribe requests, he cannot get off the list, and Yahoo! doesn’t seem to care. It has been over a year and they have never even attempted to shut down the group, despite it only being used to spam people with links to various X-rated web sites. The group even has Naked in the title. Surely that should raise some spam flags at Yahoo! I don’t think they want to do anything about it though, because it ups their numbers for advertising revenue.
I am getting spam from Yahoo groups to my Outlook inbox. I am not even registered with Yahoo.
While I can certainly understand that this is annoying, I have to agree that there is not much that can be done.
The reason is that, like all free services, if you do complain about it to Yahoo!, they will respond by shutting down the group.
Unfortunately, the spammers will just open their “business” under a new name.
I am familiar with your issue, and the reverse, which is the fact that the complaint itself can be used as an attack against legitimate groups. Yahoo! does not investigate most of the time, they just destroy the “offender”.
*shrug* You accept their hospitality, you live by their rules. Unfortunately, the rules don’t prevent spammers from making groups, they just allow you to get them shut down when they offend.
I get these alot. A few weeks ago there was a single day explosion, but now it’s just 3-4 a day.
So ironic that only my Yahoo! address gets this spam!
Yahoo! just drops the ball all the time.
I get “Check out my profile, I have added you to my friend list!” type spams on Yahoogroups. The problem is that so many groups don’t have active moderators, and I think this is largely Yahoo’s fault with all this linking of Yahoo-ids to email accounts. What happens when a linked email address goes poof because the domain is no longer there? The owner can’t do anything to get it working again. I had an email that ran a group just before the linking stuff started on Yahoo, and when the requirement began, that particular address went away because the isp went down. I can’t verify it in order to change it to something else, so am stuck with a group I own and can’t manage. Also, Yahoo’s accessibility is non-existent. I got my ids in the good old days before the dreaded visual captcha, which, as anyone can tell, doesn’t stop spam, it blocks the visually impaired instead – and Yahoo is doing diddly about it.
I guess we can assume that the above commenter, ‘Rich’ is the same one who posted a comment here:
http://www.ncs-tech.org/?p=1146
If it is the same guy, and he really is a co-founder of Grouply, then, as he has chosen not to reveal his full identity here, I would count his comment as comment spam – how sickening on a page about spam problems.
I have had several spam e-mails sent to me through the Grouply system, and the only option that either Yahoo or Grouply give to deal with this is to register with Grouply!
Whether Grouply is intentionally set up as way of harvesting e-mails and personal details or not, I see this as Yahoo!’s fault. Their security system should not allow such mass posting (it should be caught as spam with a few simple filters before it even gets delivered, as Grouply allows a single person to mass e-mails to an entire group). Also, they should be openly working in their members’ and customers’ interests to eradicate this abuse of their system. Unless, of course, Yahoo! actually owns Grouply (which seems unlikely, but who knows?)
I find there are more and more reasons to get away from allowing companies like Yahoo!, Facebook, Myspace, etc. to have access to so much personal data. This kind of abuse is killing the ‘social’ web, and I hope that people wise up and keep their personal data personal in the future.
Maybe, rather than finding people with similar interest online, we will start to find them again in the real world, where companies have a harder time profiting from, stealing from, and intruding upon our personal lives.
While it’s probably impossible to eliminate all SPAM, there are ways to at least limit the damage. I was getting overwhelmed with my Yahoo Groups, so I tried Grouply (www.grouply.com). Grouply provides a better interface to your existing Yahoo Groups. You can access all your groups from one website, and each day you receive a single “smart digest” email that covers all your groups, highlighting what’s interesting to you and hiding what’s not. This is particularly useful for folks like yourself who have lots of groups.
If you like Grouply, please tell your groups about it. The more people who are on Grouply, the better it gets!
Dave,
While I can certainly understand that this is annoying, I have to agree that there is not much that can be done.
The reason is that, like all free services, if you do complain about it to Yahoo!, they will respond by shutting down the group.
Unfortunately, the spammers will just open their “business” under a new name.
I am familiar with your issue, and the reverse, which is the fact that the complaint itself can be used as an attack against legitimate groups. Yahoo! does not investigate most of the time, they just destroy the “offender”.
*shrug* You accept their hospitality, you live by their rules. Unfortunately, the rules don’t prevent spammers from making groups, they just allow you to get them shut down when they offend.
Regards,
Chrystoph
I regularly get spam at my Yahoo mail account that has “Yahoo Domain Keys” certification, usually from Yahoo addresses. It means the spammer has gamed Yahoo Mail or gamed Domain Keys.
And because Yahoo automatically gives a higher level of trust to Domain Keys certified mail, it is more likely to get through their spam filters.
This has been going on for months. I finally had to institute my own manual filters to block it, which worked for a while, until the spammers changed their format. I’ve complained directly to Yahoo, but how much do you think that helped?
Yahoo makes efforts to control spam from outside sources, but they do little or nothing about it when it comes from within.