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On December 20, 2007 I blogged about how to effectively get rid of almost all SPAM that still makes it into your Yahoo! Mail inbox. The article was titled SPAM be gone @ Yahoo. Apparently, no one cares that I figured out a better way that what Yahoo! has come up with to block SPAM from entering your email inbox…and its free no less!

How did I come to this conclusion? I have registered a whopping 4 hits on that blog entry since 12/20/2007. I guess you all like wasting time clicking delete.

Enjoy reading about how to enlarge your penis and make tons of money on the the stock market.

If you use Yahoo Mail (may apply to other ISP and web accounts) as I do you may have noticed there are a ton spam message getting through their filters. Now of course this might be some of my own fault: i.e. allowing suspect places to have my email address in my youth. BUT, “what can I do about spam” you might say?

I have noticed a trend, at least in my emails, that the spam message is not addressed to you directly. This can work for our benefit! How? Well all you have to do is apply a filter to your email messages and send messages that weren’t addressed to you to another folder so that you can review them later. Mine is called Likely SPAM. I review this every so often and find that 99.99% is actually SPAM. The exception is the case if you belong to an email group such as a Yahoo Group. The message will get caught by this filter and is not SPAM. But this is a rare case.

See the screen shots below for help setting this up in Yahoo.

1) Goto Mail Options

2) Click on Filters on the left side and then click on the ‘Create or edit filters’ link

3) Add a new filter with the following parameters with your own email address in the proper field and the specific folder you want to save the possible spam message to. Then click the Save Changes button and enjoy a large reduction in SPAM coming to your inbox.

Guys, in case you didn’t know already, I am a news junky. I utilize Yahoo’s My Web to save all pages that of interest that day. You can benefit from my wasted time and addiction by subscribing to my My Web xml feed here.

http://myweb.yahoo.com/mywebrss/user/OTQWs84CZuXv5mWeIDM-/urls.xml

Does anyone know of any web apps that allow you to search another individual’s My Web? This would come in handy because of course I can search my own My Web but it would benefit you even more if you search my My Web. Anyway just food for thought.

Do you know Plaxo?  You should. 

Plaxo is an online address book, calendar, and task manager that syncs with Microsoft Hotmail, Google Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL, Mac, Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook, and your mobile phone. 

The initial idea behind Plaxo was to have other contacts signed up for the service as well and therefore your address book would be updated automatically if the person ever made any changes to, for example, their phone number.  Oh but it can do so much more than that.

There is no need to mention their excellent online interface because as soon as you get Plaxo set up you won’t even noticed that is working.  It seamlessly works in the background to sync all of your data.

I currently sync Plaxo to Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, Work Outlook - Exchange Server, and Home Outlook.  My Home Outlook is then used to sync to my PDA/phone (T-Mobile Dash: excellent phone by the way).  It works like a dream and cannot imagine my life without it. 

I definitely will not neglect to tell you all of this is covered under their free service!  See the Free vs. Premium services breakdown below.

Intellisync:

It all started when I wanted to sync my work Outlook to Yahoo so that my work event would show up in my personal calendar and vice versa. What do think happens, a cryptic error that is wrong. “Cannot log into Yahoo. Please check your user name and password and try again.” Well actually, you dumb program, if you enter a wrong user name and password you will get a prompt to re-enter them again.

So being a happy premium member that I am, I search Yahoo help. No luck. Oh here is phone number for premium members. Thats Me! Joy, my problems are solved!

I call Yahoo support line and ask about Intellisync. Well they can’t help but they can give me a number, OK. I also asked two other questions while I had them on the phone, but I will come back to that.

I called the Intellisync support number and find that it is no longer in service. I call Yahoo back and let them know. They tell me that since they just found out that the number no longer works that I should send a message to support via one of the web-based forms. OK, bye Yahoo support. I submit the form with my Intellisync problem and sure enough I get an auto-response that says they don’t f’ing support Intellisync.

Are your palms starting to sweat like mine are? That’s because you are pissed like me.

Two other questions:

Remember those two other questions I asked about when I was on the phone. Well…

1) Do you have an estimate on when Yahoo! Go will be ready for the T-Mobile Dash?

Response: I don’t know but here is an email to contact someone who will know.

Me: Well I send off the email and sure enough it gets kicked back as undeliverable. My mouth is now just hanging. It might not even be attached anymore, I don’t know because all I feel is rage.

2) I noticed a message on the login screen that Yahoo! Mail will now have unlimited storage, is that for premium users or free users?

Response: That is for all users.

Me: Wow that is great for everyone but what the F do I pay for a premium membership for? I guess that can now be answered one less advertisement on the Yahoo Mail interface and a customer support line that might as well be making up shit and telling it to me in German.

Let me weigh in my thought on the Yahoo!/Microsoft talks. Although it sounds like for the time being that the talks are over and Yahoo! is not interested, this did raise a lot of eyebrows. You can read other articles on the clash or benefit of the potential Microsoft and Yahoo! merger but I would like to think about an alternative: Google buys Yahoo!.

This partnership seems to be more in-line with both companies cultures. At least more in-line than a Microsoft/Yahoo! merger. A couple of creative powerhouses (Google -> Yahoo!) more concerned with innovative and pleasing customers and letting the money follow rather than forcing customer into things and thus sucking the bucks right out them (Microsoft). Don’t get me wrong I think Microsoft has done some great things as of late with their web initiatives, but they are just not quite on the same page as a Yahoo! or a Google.

Yahoo! is going to drop the number 1 photo site on the web, Yahoo! Photos, for support of a site that many people don’t want to use, Flickr, for the very reasons that Yahoo! Photos is so popular. Yahoo! Photos has a gorgeous interface and unlimited hi-res photo storage for free. What the heck else could you want. Do you want some external validation that your photos are great or suck - then by all means use Flickr. I personally think it is the dumbest thing since the pet rock.

To quote a commenter from the TechCrunch article:

Ed-May 3rd, 2007 at 11:56 pm

Has Yahoo mentioned whether or not they will be allowing free users of Flickr to store unlimited number of photos and unlimited albums (not the current 200 photos). If not, then this move will surely alienate a huge number of Yahoo users. I do love Flickr - it’s interface and features are incredibly more useful and user friendly than Yahoo Photos. However, I still used Yahoo Photos as an easy and free way to store all my original-resolution photos online for anyone to see. If Yahoo doesn’t bring this ability to its free Flickr accounts, then the only major service left that allows free full-resolution storage of an unlimited number of photos will be AOL Pictures, and that thought really scares me. Please, Yahoo, make it right - give free Flickr users the abilities you’ve given to free Yahoo Photos users until now.

AOL - is that really what you people want! Damn this decision and damn all the narrow minded people who can’t think beyond their own situation to think that Flickr is not the end-all be-all of photo applications.

Just another awesome service from Yahoo.   Yahoo! Real Estate allows you to search by location, find apartments, post listings, and much more.  It has a great user interface and is sure to be a useful tool if you are looking for a place to live or are getting ready to purchase a home.

Yahoo! Real Estate has many tools at your disposal other than just finding a house.  You can also research communities, find loans, and utilize the integrated map feature to find the homes.

I prefer Yahoo! My Web over Google Notebook. I see them as similar services and Yahoo! has come out on top for me. Yahoo allows you to save pages at a click of a button and add tags to those pages and later search the pages and tags through their standard search and if a page is in 'your' web then it will display in the results.

Google on the other hand allows you to save certain snippets of a page which could be useful in some situations but seems to me as a hassle. When saving an entire page you get just the url. And as for searching you would have to goto the notebook page and search there.

Google Notebook is a little better integrated into Firefox and it makes it easier to save something with a couple clicks whereas Yahoo! My Web has a pop up to fill out, submit, then close. Hopefully Yahoo! will stop with the silly confirmation after you have submitted and close the window or make it a little more web 2.0

Whatever I am supposed to call it. I was granted access to try out the beta version of Live Mail. Here is the low-down:

1. It works like Microsoft Oulook in your browser
2. Its sweet
3. But only if you use Internet Explorer (Firefox, so they say is coming soon)

Well…what does mdblogger think of this? Great job! But I always find myself going back to Yahoo in the end. Yahoo is buying up great companies such as del.icio.us, flickr, syncing software - itellisync, and konfabulator. Yahoo is going to be coming out with its new mail version soon too.

Bottom line I think I am going to finally choose a side and put all of my eggs in the Yahoo basket! This of course does not mean I will not be trying out other apps but I am going to try and become a full fledged yahoo man.

Firefox is kind of a benchmark I use. If you can’t write a webapp that will work in this browser then I will not be using your site. I am placing bets that new Yahoo mail, (acquired oddpost for the basis of the system) will be Firefox compliant. If not. I am sure they will beat M$ to the punch.

Any thoughts on all this?