14 DAY TRIAL // The anti-spam department at Yahoo! decided to hold a workshop in order to help users express their doubts and concerns regarding spam received via email. Also, the team wanted to give some pieces of advice to those who got tired of the numerous methods used by spammers to get their messages to as many people as possible. The general hints given by Mark Delany, also known as the anti-spam tsar, are indicated as good enough to protect against regular spam attacks.
The email address must be regarded as crucial and account information must be considered as important as a phone number. By registering to websites that don't seem 100% secure, users will receive, sooner or later, spam messages, if not from those, then from others that buy email lists. The "Spam" button was added by the Yahoo! Mail team for extensive use, namely each time a user learns that he has received unsolicited, potentially harmful emails. People are advised not to fall for messages that try to convince them that they have won large sums of money. "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is," said the Yahoo! fellow. Sign-in seals are also powerful tools in the war against spam, so they must be steadily used.
Users have to be patient as a computer can't tell immediately which is the reason for marking a message as spam. That is due to the fact that people can choose to block the sender, the type of content or even the computer which was used to send the unwanted message. Hence, only persistent marking as spam can lead to best results.
"Unsubscribing to a message from a flagrant spammer is a definite no-no. Really unscrupulous scam artists sometimes put a fake 'unsubscribe' link in their messages, and if you click on it, they actually send you *more* messages. So if you're really suspicious, it's safest to just click the 'Spam' button," also advises the Yahoo! engineer.