Can the Web's most popular site be anti-spam and pro-spam all at the same time?
Anti-spammers say the contradiction is alive and well at Yahoo.
"Anytime you're saying 'look for a list of people and send them an unsolicited message,' that's spam," said Peter Seebach, president, of tiny ISP Plethora.net in St. Paul Minnesota.
Yahoo distributes the advice to users of its Yahoo Store electronic storefront hosting service. The Web site instructs users on how to send out unsolicited email to target promotional partners for their Yahoo-hosted storefronts.
Seebach said he encountered the advisory pages on Yahoo after being led to the Yahoo pages by way of an anti-spam mailing list.
"Step one is to build a list of sites that you want to get links from," reads the page, which is entitled "Build Traffic with Incentives." It reads: __...For example, if you are selling products related to show dogs, search for show dog in all the search engines. Add those sites to your list, then follow the links to find others.
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The instructions then recommend emailing the webmasters to try to get them to link.
But using Yahoo's email service to spam these folks is a no-no, the instructions warn: __"Note: Don't use your Yahoo! Mail account to do this, because all unsolicited commercial email is forbidden by the Yahoo! Mail terms of service."
"Although this type of mail isn't really spam in the usual sense of the word, it is unsolicited, and your account could be canceled for it if someone complains."
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Is there a contradiction here?
"We're not advocating a form message or mass distribution," said Tim Brady, executive producer of Yahoo. "What we're advocating is to use search engines to find related sites, write those sites down, and contact them. Probably somewhere in there, there's a judgment call."
Seebach said these stances are all the more alarming because they contradict the company's overall opposition to spam.
"In a lot other contexts, Yahoo has been fairly solidly anti-spam. So it's sort of surprising."
But Brady said there is no disparity in its policies. "Yahoo Store's terms of service forbid spam, and we have shut down sites for spam. There have only been a couple of cases."
"I think our policies are consistent."
But to Seebach, there is no question about the nature of Yahoo's advice. "They didn't say 'find one person.' They said 'find people' -- plural -- and they acknowledge that they'd [the Yahoo Mail service] kick people off for it. The community standard is that that's considered spam."
Elsewhere in the customer advice, Yahoo Store also instructs users on how to get search engines to display a Yahoo Store site address higher in the list of search results. This activity, widely considered to be corrupting search results, is similarly disdained by the Net community.
Nick Nicholas, executive director of the Mail Abuse Prevention System noted that Yahoo's recommendations on search results are once again contradictory.
"It's particular surprising to have that come from Yahoo. Because people are trying this all the time with sites like Yahoo."
But Brady said the search advice is sound and not seeking to trick search engines.
"We're clearly not advocating putting any irrelevant words in there. It's more of an education about how search engines work. If you have your front page and it's all graphics and your competitor's is all text -- and your trying to understand why your competitors come up first in a search engine -- this is a great education. It's design guidelines."
He did acknowledge that the company may need to adjust the language of the instructions.
"We remain strongly anti-spam and nothing we suggest or promote is in any way spam like we believe.... But I can see where potentially there's a bit of a gray area here."
A gray area is problematic when it comes to stemming the growth of the Net's huge spam problem, said J.D. Falk, board member of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email.
"The problem with a gray area is that there's so many spammers out there that anybody in the gray area -- some people are going to consider it spam. My advice is to stay completely out of gray area until the complete mass of spam dies down." **
Editors note: By late Thursday, after this story was written, the page described above was changed. Yahoo removed the paragraph encouraging mass email and the note warning users not to use Yahoo for such mailings. Because the article was accurate when written, Wired News stands by the story.
