Well I was pretty much spam free for a long time. Time Warner got some and I must have not wandered over to the wrong sites. No more. Sure as stink I get crap now everyday. The naming formats are always the same, a name followed by 7 numbers @ yahoo.com. Does somebody sell lots of IDs as a wholesale business? I would rather not block all Yahoo IDs but frankly this is getting ridiculous.

Thoughts

I finally abandoned my Yahoo account last year. For both features/performance as well as completely ineffective spam filtering. Same as you -- every day I would have to re-train the spam filter on (basically) the same five spam messages. The subject lines were always similar, but the domains were different. So I guess it tricked Yahoo's stone-age filter.

My journey took me ultimately to gmail, which I had been avoiding. I actually had the account for years (from my undergrad university's alumni association), but never used it. I have to say, I love the features. It's miles beyond the competition. But, it's Google -- so consult your big brother meter. In all, I begrudgingly love gmail.

I tried a few other free mail providers, namely riseup and hushmail, as I got more interested in privacy. But in practice, there's almost no such thing as email privacy unless you host your own servers and encrypt everything. And even at that, mail headers (to/from, subject, etc) have to be plain text or smtp doesnt work. The EFF has a great primer on privacy: https://ssd.eff.org/

Oh yeah, and it's REALLY hard to tell what portions of Yahoo's connection are secure. They say that login credentials are sent via secure (https/SSL) connection, but after that I think everything is sent in plain text. Could be a concern if you're working at a public hotspot. Many (including myself) have complained to Yahoo about this without reply. They spent the time/effort on their spiffy new ajax mail app, but skipped what I would consider a fundamental component of electronic communications.

Harvesting active email IDs is a big business for spammers. Two likely scenarios:
- direct harvesting: you had malware on your PC, it harvested your address book, and the list was incorporated in a zombie spambot network.

- indirect harvesting:
1) Someone you know had malware on their PC, their addy book was harvested, etc. This is the most likely scenario.

2) A website/business you subscribed to had their email database rooted/hoovered. This happened to Ars Technica last year. They had changed server hosting, the old host sorta forgot to delete Ars' info and then old host was rooted by a hacker.

Microsoft and several governments teamed up to kill the Rustock Bot network last week. Supposedly responsible for 60% of all spam traffic.

So, bottom line, you are only as spam-free as your friend's PCs are free of malware.

A while back, I opted to host my own mail domain. I took three steps to reduce spam:
- Whitelist for my primary email account (the one's my friends use). So, if you aren't on my list, the mail goes to the trash bin.
- Bounce all email that went to an invalid addy (otherwise, Postmaster gets hammered).
- Create unique email ID's for all subscription sites. It becomes the canary in the coal mine and when you see spam, it lets you know a site was rooted, failed to follow their privacy rules, etc. I let Ars know their database had been hacked...it took them 4-5 days to believe me...but, it worked.

One day I downloaded something and didn't look around to uncheck the garbage stuff. Next day I open IE and I had a Yahoo toolbar. Annoyed, I turned it off, no biggie. A day later it was on again. So I turn it off and now the thing is now copping an attitude. Why are you removing this? It gave me a text box to respond. I gave it the riot act, using the word arrogant many times, and then that was the end of that.

The gall.

Yeah. I do a similar thing. I have a catchall and I give everybody their own pseudo email address. It's not just good for spotting a leak, it's also a most convenient way for fixing it by just blocking any mail addressed to that pseudo address.

I use Gmail as my mail app. That is, I forward everything to a Gmail account. Their web interface is just awesome and I'm often a different computers, so it's just very convenient to store everything online.
I know, by the third time I received a confirmation email of an online order, they had my real name and street address tied to my account. I also know that they can now conveniently trace everything I do on their search engine and if a website uses Adwords, they can even track me there. But at least Google hasn't made any public attempts to do anything with the personal information they gather, other than personalize the ads. Unlike Facebook, who have made it abundantly clear (to me at least) that they want to sell any piece of info they have on a person to the highest bidder, if laws wouldn't stop them.

I don't think that Yahoo has anything to do with it. I have two email accounts with Yahoo, one that I use where I know spammers are likely to find it, and one that I use for reputable companies, friends, etc. The first one gets lots of spam, and the second one gets almost no spam.

You're walking down the street and you see a fire. You don't report it. An hour later the fire trucks show up.

You didn't set it, so you aren't guilty. The place burns to the ground. You had no impact on the situation, so you continue walking with a clear conscience.

Not doing anything = zero accountability? Is that it?

Are you referring to Yahoo? On the Yahoo email account where I get spam, 99% of it goes straight into my spam folder. Did you turn on the spam filter?