How can I require email senders to enter a character string?

Question

Hi,
I am tired of getting automated spam and junk emails
I have noticed that often when I send an email to a company, they require me to enter some wierd character string so automatic spammers cant send them junk.
Is there a way that I can require anyone sending me an email to my yahoo address to have to do this entering a character string first?
I would love to have that feature, but not if it would cost more money. Is there a free way to have this feature if your answer is to upgrade to some expensive email acccount that wont help me i need to be able to require people sending me email to my Yahoo email address to first be required to enter some crazily written funky character string first that only human eyeballs can read.....you know what I am talking about....we all have to enter them before we can send an email to many "contact us' links on companies' websites to make sure we arent spamminng them and we are human with a legitimate email.How can I get this for myself? thanx

Answer 1

Sorry, but you'll need a different e-mail provider to get the sort of feature you're talking about in addition to using a POP3 client such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, etc.

The webpage feature you're talking about is called a captchka and aren't impervious to spambots. Plus, they are quite annoying, particularly for the type of application you're talking about. If you're a member of any mailing lists, you would have to whitelist the address the e-mail is coming from before you ever received the first e-mail from them and in many cases they may use a remailer that uses different From: addresses for each mailing.

Also, most mailing list administrators would remove you and blacklist your address after the first e-mail response requiring manual response or action just for the sole purpose of reaching a single person on a mailing list. That's what usually happens when users begin using a whitelist only system that requires some type of manual intervention, plus it ticks off many people who would ordinarily send them e-mail.

If you've enabled your spam filter on your account I've found that Yahoo actually does a reasonable job in filtering much of the junk. If that isn't the case with you then perhaps you should consider changing e-mail addresses or having a private one that you give only to close friends and family and a public throwaway one. When the public one becomes too exposed and the spam levels become a problem you dump it.

Answer 2

Hi, Yahoo!'s free, Original Mail service is not having server problems. The fact is, that only people who have updated to beta mail or IE7 or 8 are having software compatability problems. You don't need a repairman, your PC isn't broken. You DO need to find a way to make programs work together. Yahoo! and Sun Java have conflicts. Rather than trying to work around them, here is the easy and fastest way to cure them. Go to Tools, open Internet Options, and select Advance tab. Scroll down the list and see if you have Microsoft Virtual Machine listed, if so, uncheck the 2 java’s listed. Make sure JIT is checked, click apply then ok. and then Close. This lets MSN virtual machine launch Yahoo! mail. I reccomend that you use Original Mail until beta works out the bugs. Go back to IE6 which works just fine and is problem free. It is still installed on your pc. If you are using Yahoo Mail Plus, the paid for service that AV says the server has problems, switch to the free service. Don't wait months for Yahoo! to fix it. I hope this helps you.

Answer 3

This arrangement is only available on actual web pages. You would need every mail serve in the world to have this activated. Also this can not be used with mail clients such as Outlook.