I’ve been using Yahoo mail for years, and until recently have been very happy with it. But suddenly, since about a week ago, I have been receiving hundreds of spams a day that their filter does not catch, and I’m fed up. If there was something I could find on Yahoo’s site that indicated that they were working on the problem or even aware of it, I might be OK, but at this point I am thinking of switching to something else.
I like the very web 2.0 interface of the mail beta, and am looking for something comparable if possible. But not GMail, which I still find to be pretty flawed (no contact groups, for instance).
I’ve used Yahoo for years, and my account is largely free of spam. I get one or two spam messages in a month, if that. Once in a while something gets past the spam filter, but that’s rare.
In contrast, I also have two hotmail accounts. My main hotmail account gets spam at the rate of eight or nine a day. The other is used for signing up to sites that I suspect will send me spam. Everything gets through the spam filter, because it’s all from sites that were given that email address. I check it every week or so. It’s full of rubbish, but I don’t have to read it, so that’s fine.
The point I’m trying to make is that spam is received (apparently) randomly, but really it depends where and how you use your email address. If your yahoo account is your main mailbox, I would suspect that you have acquired some spyware which has got hold of your address. If you find and eliminate the spyware you might be able to reduce your spam.
The yahoo filter did fine for years, and then suddenly stopped. I dug around Yahoo’s site and found a community support forum, with this useful post which seems to be helping. I reset my spam filter in the mail options and I put spammer.com in the blocked addresses.
I went from getting about 2 spams per minute ending up in my mailbox to 0 in the last half hour or so, so maybe that was what I needed.
My experience with yahoo’s own support has been very poor, hence my interest in looking for other services.
At this point, it doesn’t have to be free. Things are working better now, though… So I guess my filter got overloaded. I’ve been told that sometimes if bayesian filters have too much input, they start to lose their effectiveness.
I’ve used gmail since 2004. It does have contact groups, although I’m not sure what you look for in that so it may not suit your needs.
I think Gmail does a pretty good job of automatically sending spam to the spam folder. Usually, I’ll get three or four a day in my inbox. In the last week, the number has gone up…Nigerian scam-span. As you know, types of spam tend to come in clusters and it take awhile for the filters to catch up.
I have an address at inbox.com but I don’t use it much. I did notice that even though I’ve had the address for quite some time, that account gets VERY little spam.