InBoxRevenge KS Forum

I'm using Mailwasher to filter my spam, which allows a lot of control as far as multiple conditions for one filter.

I noticed that I was getting 419 spam with a yahoo email address as the reply-to, but a different email address in the "from." I created a filter to look specifically for that mismatch, and it's catching 50% of my Nigerian spam all by itself.

The conclusions?
- 419 spammers consider Yahoo email addresses to be reliable ones for receiving replies. A spammer needs the reply-to email address to remain alive long enough for victims to respond to the scam. As we have found from our attempts to report, that's a pretty safe bet.
- The spammers have apparently found that mailing from that Yahoo address -- or even just spoofing it in the "from" address -- is not to their benefit. That may mean that Yahoo emails are now less deliverable than mail from other email hosts, or it may mean that Yahoo responds to abuse reports for email sent from one of their email addresses more than they respond to abuse reports for reply-to addresses.

Either way, criminals rely heavily on Yahoo to carry out their scams.

My own anecdotal statistics put Yahoo Mail accounts at right around 93% of all nigerian scammer accounts I see every day from 18 different sources.

#2 is Gmail but the quantity pales by comparison.

Then it's a race to the bottom with all others (mail.com, rediffmail, sify, Outlook / hotmail, etc.) fighting for the remaining 5%. The good news (I guess) is that Hotmail is now way, way down. It took several years to turn Hotmail's response time around. I wish Yahoo would wake up and take this issue seriously, but then it's only one of a million issues they probably have to clean up thanks to criminals (with Yahoo Groups probably a higher priority than this.)

Your mileage may vary.

It's really important to note that scammers specifically, and criminal spammers also, target Yahoo recipients in a very specifically different way than they would other recipients. As we saw back in the Bulker.biz days, people will specifically seek out lists of Yahoo users. They tend to want to target them alone. Not all scammers or spammers do this, but when they do, they take notably different approaches to trying to get around their spam filters, to target those addresses in a very distinct way.

The same is true of AOL. I don't know a single human being who still uses AOL, but they're out there, and they are decidedly non-technical people.


Absolutely true.

If Yahoo went away tomorrow, there would be a huge amount of confusion in the scammer community especially.

SiL