AUTHOR: The Grimace DATE: 3:46:00 PM ----- BODY:
I love the idea of Yahoo! AddressGuard: You create up to 500 unique “disposable” email addresses to use for posting things on the Internet, buying things from web sites, and communicating with friends and family- and never share your real email address with anyone. If one of the disposable addresses starts receiving spam, you just delete it and create a new one. If you create your addresses wisely, you can even use AddressGuard as a tool for tracking where spammers are finding your address. Here’s how it works: Say your Yahoo! username is roooooooooooody, and your real email address is roooooooooooody@yahoo.com. [Okay, this is insane… I tried to come up with a username that was not currently a valid Yahoo! account, to prevent that poor soul from receiving spam as a result of being mentioned in this example. I tried Rudy. Taken. Roody. Taken. Rooody. Taken, and so on, until 9 ‘o’s later when I ended up with the above invalid user name. If your name is roooooooooooody, I apologize in advance; unless you like spam you probably shouldn’t create a Yahoo! account with that name now that this has been posted.] In the AddressGuard settings you specify a single ‘base name’ and one keyword for each address you want to set up. The base name must be different from your Yahoo! account name, and should probably not have anything to do with who you really are. The keyword can be anything that helps you identify the address. For example, user roooooooooooody picks a base name of burgundyloaf and creates a disposable address for use at Amazon. His new disposable address would be burgundyloaf-amazon@yahoo.com. For each address, you can also specify nifty things such as the name that people see when you send email from that address, whether you can send email from that address at all (in case it’s just for one-way communications), what folder new mail to that address should be delivered to- and you can even assign it a color code. I use the color codes to visually break my received email into categories. Light green for e-commerce sites, brown for general web sites that require registrations, yellow for message boards, etc. Basically, AddressGuard is the reason I pay an annual fee for Yahoo! Mail Plus instead of using Gmail for free. It is the ONLY way to reliably control spam. Unfortunately, the technology is apparently not without issues. I actually have two Yahoo! Mail Plus accounts right now, because my old original Yahoo! Account is finally getting spam… tons of it, and it’s taking a long time to migrate all the various web sites I have accounts with over to my new, pristine, secret Yahoo! Account and assign them all disposable addresses. (If your main Yahoo! Address starts getting spam, you’re out of luck. You can’t change user names, which is why I had to start a new account. Eventually I’ll completely close the old account.) Well, I recently suspected there was a problem when I bought two Christmas gifts a few weeks ago from two different web sites which I had signed into using brand new a unique disposable address for each site. Even a couple of hours after my purchases I still hadn’t received a receipt email or even a ‘thank you for your order’ email from either place, even though both sites said they had sent the receipts. I did a quick test: From my work email address, I sent a single message to each of the 35 disposable addresses I had set up on my new Yahoo! account. 20 of those messages appeared in my Yahoo! Inbox within seconds of being sent. 14 of them didn’t show up until EIGHT HOURS LATER, scattered among the test messages I had received earlier in the day, which had already been read. (Oh and those missing receipts showed up around then, too.) And one message simply disappeared. A full day later I received an error report from Yahoo about the missing email, which cryptically explained: “fstat indicates that we were not given a handle to a standard file: 10000 (10000) I'm not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long.” I contacted a good friend- the guy who had actually introduced me to the wonders of Yahoo! Mail Plus- and asked if he had seen similar behavior with his account. Imagine my lack of surprise when he replied that he had in fact been getting reports that people’s emails to his disposable addresses had been bouncing back to them (although he didn’t say whether it was taking 24 hours to do so). Now, you might be able to argue that AddressGuard was serving as the ultimate anti-spam tool- after all, if you can’t receive email you can’t be spammed. But just as I believe that it’s better to let some guilty men go free than to jail a single innocent one, I feel that it’s better to receive some spam than it is to lose a single legitimate email. The current situation was unacceptable. Time to reach out and touch Yahoo! Mail “Customer Care.” Well good news, everyone! You can’t. Well, they say you can, but you apparently can’t. Of course there’s no published phone number. Of course. (If you’ve read my earlier entries, you know I actually did once track down a working Yahoo! support number, but I have since heard that it no longer works.) What they tell you to do is go to the Yahoo! Mail Help page, look up an irrelevant topic (none of the topics address technical issues… it’s more FAQ type stuff), and then click No at the bottom of the page, where it says “Is this enough information?” At that time, you’re presented with a form where you specify your name and email address, select a topic from a list of topics that probably has nothing to do with your question, and then type your real question. The awesome thing about this is, what if your problem is that Yahoo’s not delivering your fricking email? How in the heck are you going to receive a reply? I submitted two questions about this issue two weeks ago, and still haven’t heard a peep from Customer Care. Maybe it’s AddressGuard doing its thing. Or maybe Yahoo! Just doesn’t care. (Well, duh!)
-------- COMMENT-AUTHOR:Anonymous COMMENT-DATE:4:15 AM COMMENT-BODY:2005.1.1: Today I signed up for Yahoo Mail Plus. I now see a "Mail Plus" tab on the Yahoo Mail web pages. However, on the "Mail Options" page, I see no link for setting up and configuring AddressGuard. It looks as if I have been enabled for Mail Plus but not AddressGuard. I even did a text search for "AddressGuard" on the Mail Options web page, and also on the HTML source of the Mail Options web page. Believe me, there is nothing there for AddressGuard, just nothing. Any idea how I can start using AddressGuard? -------- COMMENT-AUTHOR:Josh COMMENT-DATE:9:05 PM COMMENT-BODY:Here's how I get to AddressGuard in my mail plus settings:

1. Click "Mail Plus" tab.
2. Click "Mail Options" link.
3. On the left side of the Options screen, below "Options" click "Mail".
4. Under "Spam" click "AddressGuard".

If you signed up for Mail Plus and you can't find AddressGuard after following those steps, there's definitely a problem. You should report it to Yahoo using their silly online help system. --------