Spam from Yahoo Groups has quietly disappeared

April 20, 2018

Over the years I have written several times about what was, at the time, an ongoing serious and long-term spam problem with email from Yahoo Groups. Not only was spam almost all of the Groups email that we got, but it was also clear that Yahoo Groups was allowing spammers to create their own mailing lists. I was coincidentally reminded of this history recently, so I wondered how things were today.

One answer is that spam from Yahoo Groups has disappeared. Oh, it's not completely and utterly gone; we rejected one probable spam in last December and two at the end of July 2017, which is almost as far back as our readily accessible logs go (they stretch back to June 15th, 2017). But for pretty much anyone, much less what it was before, that counts as completely vanished. Certainly it counts for not having any sort of spam problem.

But this is the tip of the iceberg, because it turns out that email volume from Yahoo Groups has fallen off significantly as well. We almost always get under ten accepted messages a day from Yahoo Groups, and some days we get none. Even after removing the spam, this is nothing like four years ago in 2014, when my entry implies that we got about 22 non-spam messages a day from Yahoo Groups.

At one level I'm not surprised. Yahoo has been visibly and loudly dying for quite a while now, so I bet that a lot of people and groups have moved away from Yahoo Groups. If you had an active group that you cared about, it was clearly time to find alternate hosting quite some time ago and probably many people did (likely with Google Groups). At another level, I'm a bit surprised that it's this dramatic a shift. I would have expected plenty of people and groups to stick around until the very end, out of either inertia or ignorance. Perhaps Yahoo Groups service got so bad and so unreliable that even people who don't pay attention to computer news noticed that there was some problem.

On the other hand there's another metric, the amount of email from Yahoo Groups that was rejected due to bad destination addresses here (and how many different addresses there are). We almost always seen a small number of such rejections a day, and the evidence suggests that almost all of them are for the same few addresses. There are old, obsolete addresses here that have been rejecting Yahoo Groups email since last June, and Yahoo Groups is still trying to send email to them. Apparently they don't even handle locally generated bounces, never mind bounces that they refuse to accept back. I can't say I'm too surprised.

Given all of this I can't say I regret the slow motion demise of Yahoo Groups. At this point I'm not going to wish it was happening faster, because it's no longer causing us problems (and clearly hasn't been for more than half a year), but it's also clearly still not healthy. It's just that either the spammers abandoned it too or they finally got thrown off. (Perhaps a combination of both.)

Written on 20 April 2018.
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Last modified: Fri Apr 20 01:44:09 2018
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