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To: Dimensio
About a month ago Yahoo was notorious for hosting a domain used by a lot of scammers for hosting their e-mail dropboxes for the scam. It has been speculated that Yahoo was directly profiting from these scams (it is documented that Yahoo profits from criminal activity through their stores).

Interesting - For about six months or so, I was getting hammered with spam that mostly originated with Yahoo. No address was valid (after a while I checked a couple, figured it couldn't hurt at that point, and they all came back unanswerable), and when I contacted Yahoo directly, they claimed they could do nothing about it. They said that their domain name was being used illegally, but they didn't ask for specific addresses or email forwards or any additional info, which seemed strange to me - you'd think they would want to find out who was abusing their system.

Anyway, it never stopped, I had to block the whole domain name, which of course still allowed me to receive them but they were just dumped into my deleted items file. Finally I just changed email addresses. I have no idea how it started and then snowballed into so many, several a day, of all kinds, ranging from get rich quick offers to life insurance to porn.

73 posted on 10/18/2002 12:55:07 PM PDT by agrace
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To: agrace
If your determination of Yahoo's involvement came from a "From" address ending in @Yahoo.com, then they may well have been innocent. The "From" header in e-mail is incredibly easy to forge, and yahoo.com addresses are often chosen. The only real way to determine the source of a message is through the Received: header, which lists the IP address of at least the last mailserver from which the message originated.

On the other hand, if the spammer claimed a contact e-mail address with Yahoo, then Yahoo is responsible for killing the account of the spammer. Unfortunately, it's not yet legal to kill the spammer himself.
75 posted on 10/18/2002 1:09:08 PM PDT by Dimensio
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