Block spam at Yahoo email account

I get too much spam at my Yahoo account. I was thinking of changing the email address. But, as you probably know, that’s not easy. Open to any sensible advice.
Donald Morrow

I don’t agree… it’s easy to change a Yahoo email address. But I don’t think it will work in your case… and it does bring forth additional problems. I am kind of surprised that your account is inundated with spam because Yahoo takes great pride in the accuracy of its filter. Anyway, there are two ways to block spam at your Yahoo account. One is to use a free third party service and the other is to pay a nominal sum to upgrade the account to Plus. Let me walk you through these two options.

Both these options involve the use of a third party spam filter because the one at Yahoo doesn’t seem to be doing the job well.

By the way, unless you want to dump the old one for good, changing the email address is not a quick solution to the problem. Why? Not only would you have to take a backup of the messages and then restore them on the new account, you also need to inform everyone of the change in the email address and hope they update their address books.

Boxbe.com: a free service that block spam at your Yahoo email account

Boxbe’s free service works on all the popular email services – Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo and AOL. It keeps the inbox clean and also stops unwanted email for good. Boxbe guarantees that important messages (those from people who really matter to you) are always available and do not get lost in the junk.

The service uses what it calls a guest list which is at first built from the addresses of people you’ve recently or frequently emailed. Messages from people in your Boxbe guest list will immediately be available in the inbox. But if the sender is not on the list, the email is placed in a ‘waiting area’. You can scan the messages-in-waiting at your leisure and either approve or reject them.

Boxbe also ranks the messages in the waiting list on a scale of 1 to 10; the lower the number the more legitimate is the message. And this is where Boxbe really shines. Ranking these messages-in-waiting is a great time saver because you can peruse the seemingly genuine ones and can ignore the already segregated high scoring junk emails.

By the way, senders can have their messages delivered directly to your Yahoo inbox through a quick verification process – they simply need to click on a link in the email they receive from Boxbe. But if the sent message was not verified, it will be given a score and pushed to the waiting list and will await your review.

So messages arriving at your account will be scanned by two spam filters – Yahoo and Boxbe.

Download Yahoo to your computer and use a spam filter on the email program

The other way to block the flood of spam at your Yahoo account is to upgrade it to Plus. This costs a tad less than $20 annually. The Plus upgrade enables POP3 access at the account which means you would be able to download Yahoo email to your computer. And once the messages are stored on your local machine, they would be available even without an internet connection. And yes, it also helps in maintaining a backup copy!

All popular email programs will be able to use the Yahoo POP3 email settings to download messages and store them on your computer. To block spam, you need to set up a spam filter on your computer – the choice depends on your budget (some spam filters are free) and the email program in use.