Why is Yahoo so inept at blocking spam from my Yahoo email account? I get the same “Lonely Married Women” email every day. I understand that the spam email address changes every day, but why can’t Yahoo spam check the subject?
Actually, Yahoo! blocks a ton of spam. We have a team working very hard on this challenge that we all face. Check out this realtime view here: Visualizing Yahoo! Mail (make sure you click on the "reveal blocked spam" button) to see how much spam is being blocked at any moment. We block 4 messages for every 1 message we deliver.Still, you are seeing spam in your inbox which means that some comes though despite our attempts. But you can do things about this too.Remember to set the spam filter on your email client. If you are using the Yahoo! web client go to the Options tab and check to see that you have spam set to be filtered out and deleted.When spam comes though, please mark it as spam. We pick up that signal and it helps improve our algorithms. This way we can block more spam in the future for you and others.General tip -- make sure not to post your email address in full on a web site. I saw a report once that showed how spambots harvest email addresses from blogs and site by searching for "yourname@host.com" pattern but they don't search for "yourname 'at' host.com" So you can reduce your risk of inviting spam by making this small change.If you get a spam mail, don't click on the links. This sends the signal that you are a real person who clicks on spam. Just delete these emails. I'm sure you don't need the pills anyways.Did you know that Yahoo! also give you disposable email addresses that you could use, say if you are doing online shopping? This is another way to make sure that your email address is only used by your real friends, and that websites only see addresses you don't care as much about.Maybe these tips will help your emailing experiences. You've been with Yahoo! for 10 years, we hope you enjoy our services for at least 10 more too!
What new features should Yahoo introduce in Yahoo Mail so that it can attract more users?
Yahoo now being a Verizon unit has other issues than attracting users.Yahoo Answers (its free user forum) predates both Wikipedia and Quora as a source of at least some fairly reliable general-interest definitions. It’s still valid even as it gets a tad gray around the temples.Yahoo! also does a nice job with weather and other mundane stuff (much like Windows and Open Office applications do).Being an early pioneer in any vertical gives Yahoo! tremendous insight into its merits/value and how it can draw more eyes to its various services. As for any business, success is both value- and loyalty-driven.Still, the fairly obvious/conventional answer to your ask is advertising and marketing (e.g., co-branding). The buzz phrase in business growth now is “customer acquisition cost” which tends to be on the order of free to $50–$60 per add depending on the product or service sold.One of the most exciting aspects of the WWW is how rapidly word travels about what’s called “hot tech.” A totally new platform with its own jargon can hit the U.S. market and establish itself as a going concern in the same year it arrives on the market due to sales streaming in via web sites with even lower overhead than infomercials.
What went wrong with Yahoo? It was once worth almost $125 billion, but today sold to Verizon for $5 billion.
There is no one single reason that Yahoo "went wrong", which I assume means that they aren't seen as one of the top couple of internet companies like they once were. There are product reasons, strategic reasons, and cultural reasons. Some top of mind examples though:Focusing so much for years on Panama (Google Adwords competitor) and search in general, when they ended up losing to Google and eventually outsourcing this to Microsoft.Becoming too unfocused. Yahoo tried to do everything and triggered the famous Peanut Butter Manifesto from Brad Garlinghouse that summarized this problem well.The shift from a desktop world where everyone used home pages to a mobile and social world. Yahoo failed to build their own successful mobile and social products or to acquire any. Yahoo got too bloated, and nobody would ever make the cuts needed to both headcount and its products/properties.Buying Flickr, then letting it languish. Buying Flickr for $35 million was a bargain when you see how huge social photos are today. They could have turned Flickr into the next Facebook or Instagram and instead didn't invest properly in it.Failing to acquire Google and then Facebook. Yahoo had opportunities to buy both of these companies when it was clear they were going to be big successes and instead wouldn't pay what was needed. For example, they had a deal to buy Facebook for $1.1 billion pretty much accepted, then Yahoo's earnings came out and the value of the deal dropped to 800M due to stock compensation and Zuckerberg balked when Yahoo wouldn't change the deal to put the price back up. Think about the value of Facebook today and that Yahoo didn't acquire them over a $300M difference.Leadership changes. Looking at companies like Google and Facebook you'll see that the same leadership has essentially been in place the whole time. Yahoo has had a shifting cast of CEOs and executive teams that has never provided a longer term vision and execution path to take shape.Acceptance of lower quality employees. By the time I worked at Yahoo from 2007-2010, there were still a ton of great A-quality people there, but there were also a lot of B or C-quality people who were not outstanding at their work. This starts to eat away at the company and make the A-players go work elsewhere.There are more reasons, but these provide a good summary...
Why am I being shamed for "still" having a Yahoo email address, when a network of thousands of people over 20 years has that address? What sense is there to losing all those business & personal contacts, to prove I'm modern or hip? It sounds absurd.
Well, first, let’s get a something out of the way.No one should be ‘shaming’ you. It’s your choice. OTOH, if people are respectfully suggesting you change, there are reasons.It has nothing to do with being ‘hip’ or ‘modern.’ It has everything to do with security. Yahoo has become a ‘spam magnet.’ Anyone who wants to spam others, if they aren’t using an .ru account, they will use a yahoo account. Yahoo has done little to nothing to circumvent this.So when people get a yahoo email, it may go directly to their spam box, depending on the filters they have, or may not get there at all, depending on the filters it has to go through on it’s way. Furthermore, if they don’t recognize your address because they know you, they may automatically assume it’s spam.Also, some people don’t really like sending to yahoo accounts, because once they send to you through their email, they know their email is not only someplace in Yahoo’s cyberspace, but more specifically on your computer. And many people consider that if someone is still using a Yahoo account, that they may not be very security conscious or educated, so they may feel their email runs a risk being on your computer if you were to get hacked.Yahoo is just thought of by some computer saavy people as the creepy old man that hangs out at the schoolyard. It’s just a spammy, icky place to some people.Lastly, if you ever do decide to get a new, free, email account, like a gmail account, for instance, where they have much better filters, there is no reason you need to lose your contacts. They can be exported from Yahoo, and imported into other email services.Need to Export Your Address Book from Yahoo Mail? Here's HowNeed to Import Yahoo Mail and Contacts Into Gmail? Follow This GuideI hope this helps.