Another Example of Great Yahoo Customer Support

I wrote a while ago about lousy customer service at Yahoo. I have another great example from this weekend. Here's my problem report:

I've been noticing for the last week or so that some spam email is being delivered to my Inbox as if the sender was in my address book. In other words, the address book icon is showing in folder view next to the sender. How are these people getting into my address book? When I click the icon to view the address book entry, it says the person is no longer in the book.

So, there's either a bug in the mail application that is causing certain spammers to appear as if they are in my address book, or the spammers are somehow hacking the address book to put themselves in for a short time. I think it would have to be the former, since it appears from experience that the icon appears when the sender address is in the book at the time the folder is viewed, not when the email was received. You would think Yahoo would care about either situation and it would be something they would want to fix.

Yahoo's helpful reply:

Believe us, we dislike receiving spam as much as you do. Your Bulk Mail folder is designed to radically reduce the amount of spam you receive in your Inbox by directing most incoming bulk mail messages to your new Bulk Mail folder instead. As this system only directs messages addressed to you to a new folder, you should not receive any additional spam as a result of this new folder. Yahoo! does not send unsolicited email messages nor do we sell or rent personally identifiable user information to anyone. For more information on this, please see our Privacy Policy at:

http://docs.yahoo.com/info/privacy/

This system is automatically activated and a Bulk Mail folder is generated as a result of your having received a message that our automatic filter has determined to be a bulk mail message. Our intent is to send solicited emails (those bulk messages you have requested) to your Inbox; however, we may occasionally send these messages to your Bulk Mail folder. If this occurs, you can click on the "Not Spam" button, located in every message. By sending examples of spam to Yahoo! for review, it will increase the effectiveness of Spamguard, Yahoo! Mail's filtering system. Yahoo! will use the messages you send to constantly improve the Spamguard technology.

Messages will remain in your Bulk Mail folder for a default period of 30 days, unless you delete them yourself. You have the option of adjusting the amount of time your bulk mail will reside in the Bulk Mail folder. Simply go to "Mail Options" and click on "Spam Protection" and choose either 1 month, 2 weeks, 1 week, or 0 days (i.e. drop bulk messages). After the amount of days specified, the messages will be subject to automatic removal. You may wish to empty (delete the contents of) your Bulk Mail folder yourself on a periodic basis, as these messages will count towards your mail quota until deleted.

It goes on, and on, about how I shouldn't respond to spam emails and how to use the spam button, etc. Does this answer have any relevance whatsoever to the problem I'm trying to report? I like Yahoo, I'm trying to be helpful by reporting something that could be a problem for their service, and this is the answer I get? Instead of an email either asking for more information if my report wasn't clear enough to investigate the problem, maybe asking for an example in my Inbox now so they could investigate the backend code to figure out why the icon is being shown, or a simple thanks for reporting the bug, I get useless information about how their spam blocking works.

Also note that the last quoted sentence is not even correct information as mails in the Bulk Mail folder do not count toward quota. So I get not only useless but incorrect information.

Update I decided to try one more time with Yahoo so I wrote another email to them trying again to explain what I have observed and why it's something detrimental to Yahoo's service. I closed by stating I did not need a canned reply about spam, but rather that they should forward the report to their technical support so they could investigate. Yahoo's reply? A canned message saying they think I have been the recipient of a worm.

Here's my followup email:

I don't really want to go round and round with customer service like has happened so many times. I will try one more time, and then, oh well it's Yahoo's problem. I mean no disrespect, but that's a pretty bad answer. If you read my question, you will hopefully see I am trying to report a possible bug in your mail service that is causing spammers to appear as if they are in a user's address book, which (a) gets the email around Spamguard and (b) makes it more likely for a user to read the email, thinking it must be from someone they know.

This report does not require a canned answer out of an FAQ (by the way, with not always correct information; mail in the Bulk Mail folder does not count toward quota) about what spam is. Rather it is something that should be followed up with your mail application support team to investigate why this is happening.

The beginning of Yahoo's "helpful" reply:

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Mail.

Based on the information you have sent, it appears you may have received an email containing a worm virus. This does not mean your computer has been infected with the virus, but most likely a computer that contains your email address within its address book has.

I throw my hands up. Maybe someone on the technical side in Yahoo will read this.

Update In case anyone is following this, I have looked at several examples in my Inbox now. All were sent from Yahoo addresses, and they are all announcements of a new email address. When you make a new user ID in Yahoo, do they give you the ability to send out announcements of your new address? These are the ones that are showing up in my Inbox as being from someone in my address book.