Yahoo to fool spammers with dummies

The Web portal said that as a way to protect their personal Yahoo Mail address from spammers, subscription email customers will be able to set up dummy email addresses for use when entering personal information at Web sites.

For example, if a subscriber wants to register for a book club, he or she can do so using a different Yahoo email address, such as user-bookclub@yahoo.com. Any message sent to the fake address is sent to the user's primary email account, but if the user notices lots of spam, Web parlance for unsolicited bulk email, he or she can delete the address.

Yahoo also said it will offer an improved spam guard for its subscription email service. Yahoo Mail Plus costs $29.99 (£17.89) a year for more features and more email storage than its free version. The company launched an anti-spam resource centre for all of its email customers.

Spam has become a massive problem for Internet access providers, corporations and email providers. The companies are forced to spend heavily on resources to prevent unwanted solicitations from clogging in-boxes and choking their services.

But consumers are the biggest victims of spam, and many email providers, including Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN and America Online have waged a public war against the phenomenon. AOL has won lawsuits against accused spammers and lobbied for anti-spam legislation.

At the same time, spam-filtering efforts have backfired on occasion. AOL has accidentally blocked some broadband subscribers for mistakenly identifying their emails as spam.