The Yahoo Spam Test

Day 0

I have created a new Yahoo! ID, one that is not memorable or obvious, and is not a word. I will not use this ID for any purpose at all, not as an email, not for file storage, and I will not sign in with this new ID except once a month in order to inspect the email in the Inbox and the Spam folder.

This should let us know how much of the web's spam is created by Yahoo! itself. If this ID is used by anyone other than by Yahoo! (who will use it for their official communiques), then we will know that Yahoo! gave this email address to the spammer.

I did this test once before, about four years ago, but I did not document it.

Here is the first instance of the inbox, from two minutes after the account was created:

New Site for AikidoOfMarin.com

After a couple months of work, I've finally managed to complete the Joomla! version of our dojo website. (Check it out) Feel free to subscribe to our mailing list while you are there.

Joomla! is an OpenSource CMS (Content Management System) that provides a robust administrative backend for managing all the text and images. There are a few bugs in the system, especially since it was not optimized to run in a shared server environment. That's what took so long to figure out. Turns out the trick is to have everything chOwned to the root user, since the installation scripts set up everything as owned by user 'nobody'. That's how the PHP scripts are run.