Yahoo Unwraps Four New Anti-Spam Tools

Yahoo has unwrapped four new tools aimed at getting even tougher against spam, including and especially a service to let Yahoo Plus e-mail users create disposable e-mail addresses they can throw out simply if they get into spammers' hands. 

"Rather than handing out your true e-mail address, you give a DEA that routes messages to the same inbox," according to Ziff-Davis Technology about the new AddressGuard feature. "If spammers get ahold of this alias, you simply discard it and start fresh with another. Yahoo! Mail Plus users can activate up to 500 DEAs."

Yahoo Plus is the more advanced storage version of the popular free Yahoo Mail, and costs anywhere between $29.99 to $59.99 a year depending on the user's storage requirements.

SpamGuard Plus, also for Plus users only, allows you to train Yahoo mail filters to suit your own needs, identifying messages as junk or legitimate using buttons at the top of your browser. This is similar to a junk mail "training" feature included in the most recent update of Netscape Communicator's e-mail program.

Standard and Plus Yahoo e-mail users both can now use two other new spamfighting tools, an upgraded SpamGuard and access to a Yahoo Anti-Spam Resource Center. Ziff-Davis described that as a site giving information in depth on spam and how best to stop it plus a message-views feature allowing you to distinguish quickly between the messages you expect and the messages you suspect.