Changes to Yahoo Mail Plus DEAs (Disposable Email Addresses)

[beq]

http://www.ymailblog.com/blog/2010/0...ail-addresses/

Disposable Email Addresses in Yahoo! Mail (you might also know them as Addressguard) are a great way to help keep your Inbox free from spam. They are email addresses that you create and give out if you don’t want to give out your primary email address. Messages to your disposable email addresses are delivered to your Inbox or a folder you choose, and you can simply delete them if they start to receive spam.

...you probably know to look for the Disposable Email Addresses in the Spam section of Yahoo! Mail Options ... Soon, we are giving ‘Disposable Email Addresses’ its very own place on the Mail Options Screen ...

There are a few other changes as well.

1. Changes to ‘Spamguard’ settings:
In the current version ... you have the option of choosing whether you want to turn the ‘Spamguard’ setting on for each individual DEA. With the upcoming changes, all DEA’s will take the Spamguard setting that you have set up in the Spam section ...

2. Changes to the delivery options:
Now, when you set up a DEA, you have an option to move messages addressed to your DEA to your Inbox or any personal folder that you’ve created. With the new DEA’s you can still do that, but now you will have to use a filter ... Create a new filter, then just put your newly created DEA in the ‘recipient’ field and select the folder you want it delivered to. (Please note: as a consequence of this change you will have to set up new filters for your current [DEA's].)

3. Changes to the ‘Sending Mail’ option:
Our current DEA creation lets you pick an option to send email from a DEA. With the new version ... you will now have the option of sending mail from all of the DEA’s you create. When you compose a new mail, you can find all your DEA’s in the ‘From:’ pick-list.

The Disposable Email Address feature on Yahoo Mail Plus accounts had an option to file received messages in a folder other than Inbox (similar to the option available for messages fetched from external POP3 accounts). This was the only reliable way to catch messages received via Bcc.

But the recently updated DEA feature removed this option and now requires us to create our own folder filing rule, with the disposable address as the "recipient" filter parameter.

The bad news (and this is an old gripe) is that Yahoo's recipient filtering does not catch Bcc'ed incoming messages since it doesn't check the envelope recipient address -- nor can we filter on a custom header such as the Yahoo-added X-Apparently-To header that contains this envelope address.

It's frustrating because the optional "To" column in the message list pane (supposedly available after adding an extra email address or a DEA) does correspond to the envelope recipient address for incoming messages (messages fetched from external POP3 accounts have no envelope, in which case the first address in the To header is displayed). So we can see which messages were received via a DEA (or the Yahoo extra email address), but we can't reliably filter those messages.

I wish the DEA feature had kept the option to file received messages in a custom folder. In fact it would be great if the Yahoo extra email address also added this option!

[beq]

I have a friend who has Yahoo Mail Plus and uses different personal email addresses on her own domains. The first personal address forwards to her Yahoo address and goes to the Inbox, while her other personal addresses forward to different Yahoo DEAs that were configured to file to different folders.

But after the DEA update and the switch to using recipient filtering rules, incoming messages received to her other addresses via Bcc are no longer filed in the appropriate folders. So now I'll have to store incoming mail for her other addresses in separate POP3 mailboxes and have Yahoo Mail poll them (so that they can still be placed in different folders). But that means the messages won't show up immediately, and what's worse Yahoo Mail doesn't even seem to support automatic polling of external accounts.

P.S. I would've set her up with a Yahoo Small Business (ie. Business Email) account, which is directly set up on a user's own domain. But these accounts can't host more than one domain (another old gripe), and there's no DEA nor any other support for multiple recipient addresses.

[hans2010]

Yes, this worked 100% accurately and reliably in the past. With the recent changes, some users have noticed the above and other issues. More info at (see comments from users, below the article):

http://buzz.yahoo.com/article/1:yaho...mail-Addresses

You can also find my article "Did Yahoo break Disposable Email Addresses" online at Usenet and Cnet. I'm interested to know if other Yahoo Mail Plus users have also found the recent changes to be extremely disruptive.

[beq]

Thanks, I also saw your discussions on the Y-Mail group (here and here).

The DEA functionality has been downgraded in a lot of ways, and it's not surprising that Yahoo Mail Plus subscribers who have come to rely on (hundreds of) DEAs are now facing various insurmountable problems.

I only touched on one aspect in this thread, in regards to the recipient filtering rules not being a reliable way to deliver to folders (they won't work when the user's address is not explicitly listed in the To or Cc header). This has been one of the shortcomings since the very beginning. For example, see this post and this post from 2005.

[Gerry]

Originally Posted by beq

Thanks, I also saw your discussions on the Y-Mail group (here and here).

I'm the 'Gerry' in those posts on the Y-Mail group and on 'Buzz'. Glad to see the discussing is going on elsewhere as well. Not that I feel it will do any good mind you.

If gmail would just pick up this option and a few other things, there really would be no reason to stick with Yahoo. You can do something similar to DEAs with gmail now, but the 'base address' is your regular gmail email address...which is not as good of course. With gmail the separator is the + sign. so if your addresses is myaddess@gmail, then you can use other addresses like myaddress+amazon@gmail.com...the only 'setup' involved would be for the filter if you chose to use one.

--
Gerry

[Gerry]

I used their live chat today to report an issue with being unable to edit any of my existing DEAs.

They gave me the following response:

Mitch: I have checked on this issue and found that this is a known issue for Yahoo! Mail.

Mitch: Our Engineering team is already investigating this issue and working on a possible fix. The ticket number for this issue is 3633480.

Mitch: We appreciate your patience and understanding while we work to resolve this issue.

[beq]

Thanks for the info Gerry. I'm sorry to read about your troubles from the other posts, though I'm not hopeful of a resolution either.

Originally Posted by Gerry

You can do something similar to DEAs with gmail now, but the 'base address' is your regular gmail email address...which is not as good of course. With gmail the separator is the + sign. so if your addresses is myaddess@gmail, then you can use other addresses like myaddress+amazon@gmail.com...the only 'setup' involved would be for the filter if you chose to use one.

Unlike Yahoo, Gmail can for the most part filter on the envelope recipient address of incoming messages (handy for Bcc) using the deliveredto: search operator, but there are some caveats.

P.S. And in addition to plus addressing, you can also interpose dots (periods) in the localpart of your Gmail address. Note that this won't work with Google Apps addresses (where dots are treated as distinct characters).

For example, mail sent to all these addresses will go to the same Gmail account:

abc@gmail
a.bc@gmail
ab.c@gmail
a.b.c@gmail
abc+whatever@gmail
a.b.c+whatever@gmail

[William9]

If you want to block one of those Gmail 'disposable' addresses, is there a way to black list them in Gmail. Or does the user create a filter (rule) to label the message to that username as spam?