Gmail and Yahoo Mail - Spammers' Favorite Services

Following today's report that spammers are currently looking to hire people for breaking CAPTCHAs, it seems like two of the services supposed to be used during spam attacks are actually the leaders Gmail and Yahoo Mail. According to The Register, some spam filtering service have already took attitude and deviced to "throttle messages from Gmail and Yahoo" as a move to reduce the amount of unsolicited emails coming from these two webmail solutions.

We can see more spam coming from Gmail and Yahoo! "Where a service is widely abused its reputation goes down and it's held back in the queue. This happens automatically. These traffic management controls are not designed to block messages, they are intended only to slow down their transit. For messages that are subsequently blocked there should be a reason given in the non-delivery report," Paul Wood of MessageLabs told The Register.

In the last few months, the amount of spam sent through Gmail accounts was significantly increased and us, the users, could see this without too much effort. First of all, there are a lot of unsolicited messages which have arrived in our inboxes, although they should be redirected to the Spam folder. Why does this happen? Because they were sent from Gmail addresses which are often treated as trusted, although the Mountain View company's filters have often proved their efficacy.

Despite Gmail, Yahoo Mail is quite a popular name among spammers because the Sunnyvale-based company's service has been used for spamming purposes for a long period of time. According to some study findings provided by MessageLabs and published by The Register, Yahoo Mail was the main tool used by spammers as 88.7 percent of the total number of the unsolicited emails coming from web-based sources.