Category: 
December 22, 2006I’ve noticed recently that Spamassassin has been marking nearly all @yahoo.com mails as {SPAM}. Interested, and slightly concerned, I looked into this. Let’s look at the headers:
X-Cjbuckley-Mailscanner-Spamcheck: spam, SpamAssassin (score=5.528, required 3.5, DRUGS_ERECTILE 0.10, DRUGS_ERECTILE_OBFU 2.05, FROM_HAS_ULINE_NUMS 0.22, FUZZY_VPILL 0.73, HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_0
DRUGS_ERECTILE..? Why would that be in a legitimate Yahoo! e-mail? The reason is shocking – appended to the Yahoo! e-mail is this signature:
All New Yahoo! Mail – Tired of Vi@gr@! come-ons? Let our SpamGuard protect you.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear….
Surely their postmaster isn’t that incompetent to realise that appending this will only mark Yahoo! mail as SPAM when scored with any decent mail-filter – spamassassin (with its non-free plugins) certainly does not like it.
Seemingly Yahoo! haven’t realised that by doing this they are becoming part of the PROBLEM rather than the SOLUTION.
Yahoo! Sort it out!
[a copy of this has, of course, gone to Yahoo's postmaster]
UPDATE: Yahoo! is now investigating…and by the amount of ‘corp.yahoo.com’ IP hits i’ve received, i think this site is making its way round internally *shudders* ;)
Horaayy..there are 2 comment(s) for me so far ;)
Chris, I’ll see if I can track someone down internally and make sure they know. If you get a chance, email me the entire, raw message including the headers.
Thanks, Ryan. E-mail(s) now sent, hopefully Yahoo! will clear this up before Xmas :-)