New anti-spam tools at Yahoo

October 21, 2003

Yahoo on Monday launched new antispam tools for its Web-based e-mail service as part of an ongoing effort to curb the Internet's most reviled by-product.

The Web portal said that as a way to protect their personal Yahoo Mail address from spammers, subscription e-mail customers will be able to set up dummy e-mail addresses for use when entering personal information at Web sites.

For example, if a subscriber wants to register for a book club, he or she can do so using a different Yahoo e-mail address, such as user-bookclub@yahoo.com. Any message sent to the fake address is sent to the user's primary e-mail account, but if the user notices lots of spam, Web parlance for unsolicited bulk e-mail, he or she can delete the address.

Yahoo also said it will offer an improved spam guard for its subscription e-mail service. Yahoo Mail Plus costs $29.99 a year for more features and more e-mail storage than its free version. The company launched an antispam resource center for all of its e-mail customers. Spam has become a massive problem for Internet access providers, corporations and e-mail providers. The companies are forced to spend heavily on resources to prevent unwanted solicitations from clogging in-boxes and choking their services.

But consumers are the biggest victims of spam, and many e-mail providers, including Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN and America Online have waged a public war against the phenomenon. AOL has won lawsuits against accused spammers and lobbied for antispam legislation. At the same time, spam-filtering efforts have backfired on occasion. AOL has accidentally blocked some broadband subscribers for mistakenly identifying their e-mails as spam.

Story by Jim Hu
Source: C-Net News

        

Read Serge Thibodeau's daily blogs on search engines at Serge Thibodeau Live. We strongly suggest you bookmark our web site by clicking here.

Get your business or company listed in the Global Business Listing directory and increase your business. It takes less then 24 hours to get a premium listing in the most powerful business search engine there is. Click here to find out all about it.

Rank for $ales strongly recommends the use of WordTracker to effectively identify all your right industry keywords. Accurate identification of the right keywords and key phrases used in your industry is the first basic step in any serious search engine optimization program. Click here to start your keyword and key phrase research.

You can link to the Rank for Sales web site as much as you like. Read our section on how your company can participate in our reciprocal link exchange program and increase your rankings in all the major search engines such as Google, AltaVista, Yahoo and all the others.