Yahoo Mail

I was there for day one of Yahoo! Mail. Of course it wasn't really Yahoo!'s own thing, they had bought Rocket Mail or some other webmail based product. It was a great address to put down in all those annoying webforms that made you put in a valid e-mail address so that they could mercilessly send you solicitations later, not unlike most offline retailers who get your shipping address and do the same thing.

Then there was real spam. The typical, brother/sister/mother/dog triple-X stuff, toner cartridges, home mortgage, et al. All told I racked up about 50-75 messages a day.

I know, it could have been worse. Then Yahoo! added SpamGuard and it sucked. I don't know what they have done to it, but now it seems to work really well. Now I can mark a message that I think is spam. Now, here is the catch, I signed up for a lot of that e-mail, sort of. I gave them my address and it was in the days before privacy policies and the concept of opt-in lists. Even so, I think it would be unfair of me to report these messages as spam. They are legitimate companies trying to make a buck and sure enough at the end of every message they gave me the chance to opt-out, usually with just the click of a url. Most real spammers seem to have dropped that option since it triggers points in SpamAssassin which they likely can't afford.

Now my Yahoo! Mail inbox is under control. The pr0n spam gets caught by SpamGuard and I've gotten off all the lists that I had been put on that I don't want to be on anymore. Did I really sign up for eCoupons? Now I get 2-3 messages a day and I can find the NASA JPL Lab e-mail and Motley Fool Newsletter without having to wade through a stuffed inbox.

Don't. Don't give me that look. Oh boo hoo, Pat can't find the real email in the sea of junk. Use filters you git. Serves you right for giving out a real address. Serves you right for using webmail. Use procmail, mutt, mailx, emacs. I have three other main accounts that I get e-mail at where I use a combination of Apple's Mail.app, procmail, and SpamAssassin. I'm just talking about one account that I let get out of control and how I got it back under control.

Well, there it is.