yahoo email spam. what should i do about it?

Question

Lately i've been receiving lots of spam and it seems they are all from the same spammer and most of them looks like this or something similar:

congratulations! this is to officialy inform you that your email address was
electronicaly  picked in our end of the year 38th annivarry promo sponsord
by the foundatuion di vittorio to  celebrate our 38 year anniversory, you
have been approved to recieve $1,000,000.00, to file

For your claims kindly contact
Mr.KELVIN MORRIS (PHONE: +2348035255650 )
fdv.grantrelease1@yahoo.com.hk

With the following details:
1.Full name
2.Country
3.Address
4.Telephone Number
5.Occupation
6.Sex

To avoid delays and mixup kindly specify how you wish to recieve your funds:
1.BANK TO BANK TRANSFER,
2.COURIER DELIVERY.

for more detail about our company please visit.
www.fondazionedivittorio.it
Congratulationsonce again.
Prof. FRANCISCO GOMES
C/O  FOUNDATION DI VITTORIO

i wonder if this is just like a new virus ( where it targets random people) or somehow my email address was expose to somewhere.

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

That is a scam! Somebody is trying to verify your e-mail address so it can be sold to spammers, or they are trying to get your bank account info so you can be ripped off later! The minute you open such a mail, a tracking cookiw will let the source know that they found a real mail address and you will be getting loads of spam. Forward such a mail to:
spoof@yahoo.com 
phishing@cc.yahoo-inc.com
http://www.spamcop.net/
Federal Trade Commission spam@uce.gov
Treasury Department 419.fcd@usss.treas.gov
http://www.consumerfraudreporting.org/reporting.php - this site contains links for various countries

Here's how to do the forwarding bit: click the crtl key and at the same time click the "forward" button to forward a message as an attachment, mac users should click the "apple" key and click "forward" simultaneously. 

To read more about scams go to the links below.
http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/hughes/4337
http://www.fbi.gov/majcases/fraud/internetschemes.htm

To look up possible scams, phishing mails and sites illegally trying to obtain your private data, visit: http://www.419legal.org/

Now about fighting spam and scams:

#1: Yahoo has a spamguard filter, but only if multiple users report an address as spam will it be treated as such by the filter.

You have a personal list for blocking addresses in spam options. Anything you mark as spam in Mail classic will be added to that list, in New Yahoo mail adding addresses to the list has to be done manually. If you ever receive anything from those addresses in the future, it will be deleted automatically, you won't even notice when you got some more crap from them. One problem though: the list of blocked addresses is limited to 500 and spammers often change their address. So you must sometimes delete some of the older blocked addresses to make room for new ones.

Go to this link where everything is explained in detail:
http://help.yahoo.com/us/tutorials/mail/mail/spamguard1.html

#2: The Federal Trade Commission (www.ftc.gov) is supposed to help you eliminate spam mails. Forward spam to: spam@uce.gov, in the subject line enter something like "unsubscribe link results in more spam", "unwanted spam message", "no unsubscribe link" or something similar.

When the FTC gets your mail, they will look into the matter and when they find out who the spamming source is, they will take legal actions. 

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/edcams/spam/index.html

#3: Check Mailwasher, it helps to eliminate spam from your inbox...

Set up your email account(s) in MailWasher and hit the "Check Mail" button. It then downloads all new message headers and displays message details alongside each one (priority, subject, from, to, etc.). Any email that MailWasher considers to be spam is highlighted for easy sorting.

Two checkboxes are located next to each message header: "Delete" and "Bounce". If you click "Delete" the email will be marked for deletion, click "Bounce" and the mail will be marked for bouncing - a fake "address not found" email will be sent to the sender. Once you have decided what to bounce and delete, click "Process Mail" to get it done and your mail client launched for downloading all accepted emails.

MailWasher has a "blacklist" and a "friends list" to enter good and bad email addresses. Addresses in the blacklist are marked for deletion, and addresses in the friends list will be marked as okay. Filters can be set to increase MailWasher's effectiveness. You can have email addressed to "undisclosed recipients" automatically deleted and bounced for example.

Note: the program is free but limited to one email account. MW Pro supports multiple mail accounts.

http://www.mailwasher.net/

demetrice · Answer

Join the crowd---we're all getting them---over and over. AND: You'll keep getting them till Yahoo fixes the glitch---which they've aknowledged and are working on it. I've had the same Best Answer coming every 40 minutes since yesterday about 3:00 pm----BUT----what's even worse is---nothing else is getting through---just the one BA. It "WAS" a good answer, alright---but not THAT good.

Anonymous · Answer

it will be a scam they have not targeted you they just send them to loads of email addresses they don't even know who they have sent them to theses people surf the internet trawling for email addresses just delete it don't open it at all as that way they know your email address exists

Anonymous · Answer

Switch to gmail

or just ignore, spam will happen there's nothing that can be done about it. Just ignore.

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yahoo email spam. what should i do about it?

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