I have a regular email address that I use everyday for regular emails from subscriptions and from casual friends. I have another that I don’t use that much and was planning on closing it. I get a lot of Nigerian 419 and lottery scam emails on a weekly basis and I report them to abuse@yahoo.com soon afterwards.
On a lark, I decided to check to see if the Yahoo accounts that the scammers were using had been shutdown, so I put all the email addresses into my other account (the one I don’t use) and sent a little note to all of the scammers who had contacted me.
To my surprise, most of the email addresses were still active, including the Yahoo accounts. I know this because the emails didn’t bounce-back to me. Yahoo seems to have the largest number of active scammer addresses and I had reported all of them. I reported them a second time and, still, most of them are still active! If Yahoo is serious about stopping scammers from using Yahoo Mail, why don’t they shut them down?
I’ve reported every single scam email sent to me. Blocking them from my Inbox doesn’t shutdown the address being used to run the scam.