Yahoo!'s lack of resolution in Geocities spam forwarding site creation

[Matt Kettler]

rowan wrote:
> The problem with Geocities allowing people to create web sites that are
> relays to Spamvertised sites has been around since at least 2005 from
> what I can tell.  Since the spammers are routing through open relays,
> bot nets or some other varying mechanism the only way to eliminate the
> trash from my inbox was a procmail recipe which /dev/nulled  anything
> with a geocities.com link in the body.  I had tried complaining to
> Yahoo! but there is never a response from domainadmins at yahoo-inc.com.

Why would you.. Is there anywhere in the world telling you to use
domainadmins at yahoo-inc.com as an abuse reporting service?

That's the administrative contact for the domain.


Yahoo's abuse desk is abuse at yahoo.com. That said, this is also unlikely to go
answered, but at least you are sending it to the proper place.


That said, I've not seen many geocities redirectors lately. Last week I received
a total of 60 messages with geocities URLs in them. Total, including all the
nonspams. (I still have an info rule in my SA config matching all geocities
URIs, and MailScanner is set so it logs the SA results of all nonspam and spam
messages.)

By comparison, my site received 23k+ emails last week, 13k+ of them tagged as
spam by SpamAssassin.


I have to say I'm wondering how you're seeing so much of this mail. Sure there's
some spam with it, but even if all 60 are spam it's still less than 0.5% of my
site's spam volume.

By comparison, about a year ago (ie: spring 2006) spam containing geocities
URL's used to account for over half the spam received here.

I'd say they've made considerable progress since then, given that it's a full
two orders of magnitude less common.

Is it different at your site? Are you still getting over 10% of your spam being
geocities redirectors?