QI got an obviously fraudulent e-mail claiming to be from USAA bank. I tried to report it to phishing-report@us-cert.gov, an e-mail I got by Googling how to report spam. But when I tried to forward the message, it would not send. So I copied it and pasted it into a new e-mail. This e-mail was rejected by Yahoo's e-mail service with this message: "Your account has been temporarily blocked from sending messages. This block can be caused by sending messages that trigger our spam filters, or by having too many recipients in one e-mail." Can you suggest how to report this scam and others like it when my e-mail is being blocked?
BARBARA HOWIE, MIAMI
AWhen you tried to resend a spam message, Yahoo's automated e-mail filters flagged you as a spammer, even though you weren't.
These filters exist because spam now makes up about 90 percent of all e-mail sent, and the filters manage to stop most of it.
Why should Yahoo think that you, a law-abiding citizen, are a spammer? Large e-mail providers often find that someone using their service has had his or her PC taken over by malicious hackers and turned into a rebroadcasting point for spam. As a result, the providers disable offending e-mail accounts.
At Yahoo, these blockages are temporary, typically less than a day. Why? Automated spam filters are based on several e-mail scanning methods, including a "content filter" that uses what is called "fuzzy logic" to decide whether an e-mail is spam. This fuzzy logic is updated constantly, so that an e-mail flagged as spam one day may not be blocked the next.
If you continue to have problems reporting the spam (either by forwarding it or pasting it into a new e-mail), contact Yahoo customer service at tinyurl.com/27trlrn.
In addition to the spam reporting address you listed, the Federal Trade Commission suggests reporting spam to spam@uce.gov.
