Spammers like using Yahoo Groups homepages to advertise their shit and then use the group invitation feature to mass spam users about it.

Lately I’ve been receiving an increasing number of these spammer group invitations and I’m reluctant to mark them as junk mail since it’ll poison the Bayesian database and probably flag legitimate Yahoo Group invitations as junk as well.

I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of people just delete these spam invitations and move on and no one is bothering to report them.   In the past, I’ve done the same.   It’s quick, it’s easy.

However, this time I’ve been making the small effort to report every single spam invitation I’ve received.  I was expecting days before they took action (or no action at all) but I was surprised at the responsiveness of Yahoo’s abuse department.

Within just a few hours (and even sooner in some cases), the spam group and its connected user account was deleted.

In contrast,  I reported a site that carried a virus/malware payload to its host’s abuse department.  That was back in September…  Two months later, the site is still there and injecting its payload into hapless visitors.

But like all scumbags, spammers count on user— and sometimes host/sysadmin— apathy to help them continue to do their dirty work.

Has this experienced changed my outlook?  Hmmm… maybe it shifted it just a little over to the positive side even though I acknowledge the fact that it can be a futile battle to fight.  The spammers simply create another user, another group (probably by the hundreds) and send out invitations again.

One person submitting an abuse report may not amount to much.  But many people doing that could get some results.

It’s something to consider…

My cat likes to “box tunnel” too, but he generally doesn’t build up a running start…

Cute ’splayed legs’ action going on there too.

Tags: cats