My Life as a Spammer… or so says Yahoo!

Man, that is a nightmare.

The anti-virus companies really can run roughshod over internet marketing. Norton would block affiliate banners. AdAware would "find" cookies in its spyware searches. Along the same lines, McAfee seems to have no regard for a false positive in its database.

I hope you're able to resolve this issue quickly.

That is a nightmare … going to sphinn it and see if we can get some traction in the SEO community

I would encourage everyone to Sphinn the story here: http://sphinn.com/story/45838

Totally irresponsible of both Yahoo! and McAfee. These big companies often act quite irresponsibly when it comes to how they handle the needs and issues of other sites that come rely on their paid and non-paid relationships with the likes of Yahoo (or Google for that matter). Who's internet is it, afterall?

David start emailing to McAfee corporate and public relationship email addresses.

This is the same bent logic as Akismet.

Here you can find the email addresses.

http://www.mcafee.com/us/about/contact/index.html

David, I agree that Yahoo needs to take more responsibility here. It's shocking to see thier responses when this is such a clear opportunity for them to support their advertisers and rise above Google from a customer service standpoint. What a miss.

While it's unfortunate, it seems the best place to take the fight is to McAfee. The SiteAdvisor page does give you the site owner a place to post a comment. You could also ask your happy customers and friends who know you are not a spammer to register as a reviewer and post positive comments. And, since the test indicates a somewhat dated Oct 2007 test date, I would think McAfee would be willing to re-test your site.

Good luck and thanks for alerting me to this issue.

I'm confused. Did you actually contact McAfee as requested?

I take your point that Yahoo is making the public statement here, but if your goal is to fix a false positive, and there's a published mechanism to challenge a listing, surely it would be wise to use it?

Alternatively, people might start thinking that Rule#1 applies, if you see what I mean.

Thanks for the support. I will continue my campaign today.

Richi, as stated above, I did contact McAfee through the recommended channel. No answer. We also tried reaching our contact at McAfee. No answer. What is Rule #1? He who has the gold makes the rules?

I can see why McAfee would ignore me. The system works. I can find only 2 sites listed as spammers in hundreds of keywords: AnyCoupons and Excite. I assume bother are false positives. That tells me that McAfee rarely makes mistakes (yes, it did in our case) and that there is no need for Yahoo to use this system for SPAM. It may make sense for downloads.

Again, the issue here is less about technology and more about Customer Service. A false positive on a beta service wouldn't be the end of the world… if Yahoo were willing to correct it. This is like Audi in the 1980s. There was a problem with the accelerator. Audi told owners that it was the fault of the driver and not the car. Audi was right… and lost 50% of its US sales the next year. In this case, Yahoo is both wrong and blowing customer service. Yahoo, the most trafficked website in the world, looks foolish claiming that it has no control over its websites or two of its advertising systems.

We'll see if I have any luck today. I will try escalating it a bit more.

-David

David, trying to spread the word to all my Twitts. Let's see if the rest of the SEO boys and girls can give you a hand.

I know Roy from Wikipedia that is how I found you.

Very sorry I missed that bit about you contacting McAfee. Presumably you went through the "websiteOwnerVerification" process?

This behavior is endemic in the anti-spam world. The problem is that anyone who sets themselves up as a judge of who is a spammer gets quickly be swamped with bogus complaints. They come from actual spammers who are trying to convince the service that they're really legitimate direct marketers.

The people receiving the spammers' complaints quickly learn the essential truth behind Rule#1 — that is, "Spammers lie" (for all the rules, see http://bruce.pennypacker.org/spamrules.html ).

This, unfortunately, raises the bar for folks with a legitimate grievance.

Hi David,

It's Shane from McAfee. Thanks for your comments and concerns about our red (risky) rating of http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/anycoupons.com.

We were wrong to let our test data for anycoupons.com get so old (the current public results date from October 2007.) We typically test (and re-test) much more frequently.

I spoke to our e-mail team and they told me that we've recently started 4 new tests for your site. So far, the results look fine. While we wait for final results, we will be changing the rating of anycoupons.com to yellow and indicate ‘retesting in progress / probably safe to use’.

This new rating will go into effect soon.

Assuming these test sign-ups continue to stay "clean," your site will revert to green (no risks found.)

Regarding the old red rating, we often find good sites that accidentally fall prey to spammers, usually without the site owner knowing anything till they see our (surprising) rating.

To test a site's e-mail practices, we use one-time use e-mail addresses that are sufficiently complex to resist dictionary attack. After submitting each address only once, we then watch that inbox for resulting e-mail.

Thanks again for sharing your concerns.

I would fly out to their corporate headquaters and find someones butt to kick. I had seen those sends spam in the search results and was totally confused because the site they had listed doesn't send spam either. Totally bogus…the paid inclusion thing is beyond horrendous.

Shane, thanks for stopping by. I appreciate that McAfee is retesting. I can accept that there will be false positives and it looks like there have been very few. My issue in not with McAfee but with Yahoo. Yahoo is 100% responsible for what is happening to AnyCoupons.

AnyCoupons still has a red rating on both Yahoo Search and on SiteAdvisor. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for those to update.

I have spoken to 2 people from Outrider this morning. The issue has been properly escalated there. My Outrider team is as frustrated as I am. They are getting the same ridiculous answers from Yahoo and received no advanced warning from Yahoo that Paid Inclusion clients would be taken offline.

To summarize: The issue here is solely about mismanagement by Yahoo. While I've been reading about Yahoo's mismanagement in the press and on blogs, I didn't expect to get such a large personal dose of it.

Testing SearchScan on SERPs was fine (note that Google tests new programs on a limited number of searches before rolling them out across the search engine). Calling it beta and offering no support is mismanagement. Taking no responsibility for what goes on your site is mismanagement.

Then there is our 5+ year relationship with Yahoo / Overture. Cutting us off and then telling us that we are welcome to submit ads when we stop spamming is mismanagement. Taking down our ads through an automated system is mismanagement. Telling us we have to contact McAfee is mismanagement. Our relationship is with Yahoo, not McAfee. Yahoo chose to implement the system, not McAfee. A lack of communication channels with McAFee and no escalation procedure is mismanagement.

Terminating our 4 year relationship with Paid Inclusion without contacting us (or the company Yahoo transitioned the relationship to) based on an automated system is mismanagement. Telling Outrider and us that we need to contact McAfee is mismanagement.

It's nice that Yahoo has such faith in McAfee. Maybe execs at Yahoo would like to face a judicial system where they are guilty until proven innocent.

Note to Jerry Yang: I live within 15 miles of your Santa Monica and Burbank offices. I've watched Yahoo lose for years. I have first-hand experience with Yahoo's mismanagement. I'd be happy to spend a few hours a week helping you fix your management problems that are driving all the good people away. (I keep getting e-mails from friends who are bailing out.) I can help you with your product roadmap so you can avoid missteps like SearchScan, 360, etc. Hell, if I had your resources, I can only imagine what I can do. I'm here to help if you want to start winning and be the one to make hostile takeover bids.

David I agree, mismanagement is a big issue there resulting in their lack of ability to catch Google…have you ever hosted a site with yahoo and tried to get some help there…OM freaking G…the morons they have in customer service and so called management.

– Yahoo, McAfee and The Scarlet letter –

I HIGHLY suggest Yahoo and McAfee rethink the plan of their issuance of The Scarlet letter via this SearchScanBeta to online merchants within the Yahoo organic search results. Publicly slandering and defaming a company, destroying their consumer traffic, and dominating perception and opinion concerning the sites "PERCEIVED" business conduct of a company is WAY out of line.

My thoughts on Yahoo’s SearchScanBETA – 4 words…

Isolation – Domination – Submission – Control

It is unimaginable that Yahoo was sold on this beta and actually tested this in a live arena on breathing businesses and I am dumbfounded that anticipation of a mistake was not factored in as a probability and I am equally shocked that there was no process set in place for management of a mistake of this caliber…

Mouth Agape – and Stunned….

Shane, you may need to tweak siteadvisor algorithm. It would not be appropriate to sign up on someone's blog and after receiving on email from them via an email list, to put them on McAfee Spam list.

You need to read the disclosure that bloggers have with regards to sending emails to users.

I am not saying that you should allow Website owners to abuse and Spam their users, but there is something like common courtesy.

Also I hope you are signing up with siteadvisor email address not some Hotmail or Yahoo fake address, because that would be entrapment.

I run an anti-Spam project PHSDL http://www.phsdl.net and I provide the service on volunteer bases to Mr. King at Aboutus.org, that is where I know you guys from.

I started the project in the first place because Akismet, Yahoo uses them and has bloggers collect Spam data for them, has too many false positives.

I hope my suggestions are useful and you will consider implementing them.

David, sorry with the technical part, I hope Yahoo will clear the problem up for you ASAP.

I and other concerned industry individuals are making this problem public, so hopefully you will not have to wait long.

Regards,

Igor

Igor, don't apologize. Get as techie as you like. This crwod should be able to take it.

Greg Yardley has his own theory about this: http://yardley.ca/2008/05/13/html-form-ads-a-risk…

Thanks again to all for your support! Maybe some of you can go work at Yahoo and fix things there.

[Still showing as red warning on Yahoo Search. SiteAdvisor has been update to yellow with the following: "Our analysis indicates this site is probably safe to use, although retesting is in process." No word from Yahoo to Outrider or from our rep at Yahoo Paid Search Marketing.]

UPDATE: Just got a call from our Outrider rep. Yahoo asked him to get a statement from me that we don't SPAM or sell member e-mail addresses. I pointed out that not only did I state it publicly here but that McAfee no longer considers us spammers and has changed us from red to yellow. Yahoo seems to have no way to get updates.

I put on my product management hat and contemplated how I would have designed the SearchScan system. Of course, I would have tested it first instead of rolling it out on all SERPs. Of course, I would have tested it on SERPs before using it as a filter for Paid Inclusion and Paid Search partners. Of course I would have notified the internal teams and our agency partners. Of course, I would have made sure that any company whose campaigns were managed by my reps received notice. Of course, there would be an escalation procedure. Of course, we wouldn't tell any of our partners that the burden was on them to contact a company that they had no relationship wtih but on whose automated system we were relying. All of that aside, how would I have built the systems differently?

First, I would have an override box. McAfee might be wrong. Give our team a way to override it. Create an option for the override to expire in a week or two or to be indefinite. The expiration period would give McAfee time to retest and the indefinite would be for sites that McAfee just got wrong but we knew were right.

The override would trigger a message to McAfee to retest. I'd work with McAfee to make sure that its systems could receive the messages. We could always start with e-mails if we didn't anticipate many complaints.

Then there is the question of updates. It's been a couple of hours since our status went from red to yellow and Yahoo still doesn't know about it. I'd make sure that we were receiving updates from McAfee on a regular (hourly?) basis. If possible, I would want to get the changes sent as soon as possible as opposed to a complete file. It's really only the changes that I would need. Those could be instantaneous as they happen. Hell, I'd be Yahoo so I could demand something like that. [I've negotiated with Yahoo a few times and they always demand things like that.]

That's all that was required. It's pretty simple stuff. Again, Jerry, I'm here to help!

I had a past negative experience with McAfee SiteAdvisor where we were labeled a spammer also (prior to Yahoo! using it for SERPs). I wrote and rewrote them and finally they retested and we "passed" (of course, I've never spammed a day in my life).

One problem with McAfee's system, as I see it, is they don't appear to account for the intentions of the newsletter list. Some lists are daily or even triggered by events and readers are clearly notified before joining that such is the case. Some are less often. It seems that McAfee's SiteAdvisor algo simply counts the number of emails over a period of time and if the number goes over X (whatever that is), then you are labeled a spammer. Not good enough.

Mike, that's a great point.

Excite is the only other alleged spammer I was able to find on Yahoo SERPs. (If anyone find others, please let me know.)

It appears that Excite has a different issue. Take a look at http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/excite.com/email

It looks like McAfee opted in to receive e-mails from third parties. There is an option on the sign up form that defaults to Yes.

"Excite may make the information that I supplied available to selected Third party companies so that they may contact me regarding services that may be of interest to me."

Excite sent the e-mails that McAfee opted in for and McAfee deemed that to be SPAM. That seems wrong.

-David

ah Yahoo. I see a pattern here. I remember the incident with Yahoo from last year where I wrote multiple posts here at ReveNews and SearchEngineJournal.com.

(Here is the last post of the series)

Yahoo! did not only respond poorly to reports of bugs in one of their services, ignored specific information about what the consequences could be of that bug and specific recommendations for solutions for how to fix it, no, they terminated also business relationships with me (who spent time to help them), because I complaint in public when I was myself affected by that bug as I reported and contacted Yahoo! about directly a few months later.

Nothing seemed to have changed over at the big Y!. Too bad that MS was not able to acquire them, because with all the flaws and issues Microsoft has, the one thing you cannot complain about is their tech support and their ability to respond to bugs, if somebody took the time to provide very specific information to narrow it down and reproduce the issue AND a solution for how to fix it.

At the end of the day (and I mean that literally)…

* McAfee made a partial fix. Even though I have proven that we could not have sent the e-mails (we don't know that the e-mail address is attached to SiteAdvisor) and even though McAfee admits that it gets false positives and the looks like one, AnyCoupons is listed as a Yellow Alert.

* Yahoo continues to list AnyCoupons as a spammer on its SERPs even though Yahoo has knows that McAfee changed the site's rating from Red to Yellow. In case Yahoo didn't know and because I made my offer above, I sent an e-mail to Jerry Yang today. No reply.

* Yahoo continues to ban us from Paid Inclusion. Outrider has several people in New York and Sunnyvale working to rectify the situation. Yahoo knows that McAfee has changed its rating for the site from Yellow to Red. No crawl. No traffic.

* Yahoo Search Marketing has not reinstated our disabled campaigns. Our rep has not answered my last two e-mails. It could be because I told him first that I don't want to hear that Yahoo is powerless to manage its own advertiser relationships (assuming I'd hear it was McAfee's fault for our campaigns going offline) and then that I don't want to hear that we have to resubmit our campaigns to compensate for Yahoo's mistake.

I expect that Yahoo will, at some point, remove the red warning without comment, without notice, without an apology and without compensation.

I expect that Yahoo will, at some point, reinstate us in Paid Inclusion without comment, without an apology and without compensation. We will get notice from Outrider.

I expect that Yahoo Search Marketing will advise us that we will be permitted to resubmit our campaigns that it wrongly removed without an apology, without compensation and without any offer of assistance to get through YSM's Editorial Department (not the same group that Jay Gallanatti ran). We advertise a lot less post-Panama… no need to rub that in.

It is ironic that I would have my company not advertise at YSM, formerly Overture, formerly GoTo. I spent a few years of my life evangelizing GoTo and paid search. My job was to sell the portals, search engines and browsers on using GoTo's paid search results. I hopped over the Atlantic to help get the big European Internet companies in England and Germany to adopt it. I drank the Kool-Aid in 1999 and it hasn't worn off. [Sigh]

Maybe Yahoo will "get it" tomorrow. Then again…

David you may want to sign up with ICANN blog and file a complaint with ICANN against McAfee and Yahoo.

I did it when I had a problem with a company. It gets their attention. Especially Yahoo is a domain registrar.

http://public.icann.org/blog/2763

Unfortunately the tendency is for big companies to remedy things as you said David, "without comment, without notice, and without an apology" since to admit fault publicly may open them up to litigation. What's interesting is that in a recent program I heard on NPR is that most people are simply looking for acknowledgment and remedy of a situation rather than litigation.

I do want to applaud David for the method he is using in taking on Yahoo.

Latest news: Yahoo’s escalation process will take at least a month to review the site. It’s been over 24 hours since McAfee admitted its mistake and removed the red warning.

I found another site that has a false positive: Clearwire. Shane, please retest Clearwire. I’m sure the good folks there would appreciate it. You might also want to look into how your bot signs up for partner e-mail and then calls it SPAM, a la the false positive for Excite.

I sent another e-mail to Jerry Yang. No answer. Maybe Yahoo blocks my e-mail as a spammer. If you know Jerry, please pass along the URL to this article and ask him to contact me.

Cumbrowski.com is currently listed as a yellow

This reminds me of my Google pixie dust battle over paid reviews.

It might also be a good reason not to trust Akismet for comment spam if you are using subscribe to comments on a blog.

I suppose the most shocking thing is you actually received traffic from Yahoo in the first place.

p.s. there seems to be some memory problems on the server

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 338 bytes) in /usr/www/users/revenews/wp-content/plugins/wp-super-cache/wp-cache-phase2.php on line 257

While I really don't want to write about how great Google is… a couple of hours after publishing this blog post, I did a search in Google. Guess what? It was there!

Today Yahoo finally said that it was going to reconsider our designation as a spammer and let us back in to Paid Inclusion. [Note to our team at Outrider: THANK YOU! You guys are amazing. I cannot believe that as one of only two Trusted Feed Generators for Yahoo's Paid Inclusion program that Yahoo made you work so hard and jump through so many hoops. The PI folks at Yahoo (and the executives there) should be embarrassed and owe you (yes, and me) a huge apology!]

So here's the deal… while Google can pick up a new Web page within hours of it being published, Yahoo cannot change its search listings… FOR DAYS! Even though Yahoo realizes that it is committing libel against AnyCoupons by keeping the spammer notice on our listings, it cannot (or will not) remove the red warning… FOR DAYS! Even though Yahoo has been set up to receive our feed for years, even though the feed has nothing to do with placement (or so says Yahoo), our listings through Paid Inclusion will not return… FOR DAYS!

And Yahoo wonders why so many people think they can do a better job managing the company. [Sigh]

David, I am glad Yahoo is listing. If we all as SEOs, SMCs, and developers have to make a lot of noise for them to listen to us and fix their problems, then that is what we will do.

I am glad Andy Beard came around, because he is really a strong advocate for Webmasters, against the injustices done by search engines and other Internet companies to them.

What Andy said about Akismet is very true. Once Akismet has you on their list it is a very big problem to get off it. The way Aksimet works is that layman Yahoo bloggers mark comments to Blogs as Spam and it goes to Akismet Spam list. So if someone's comments are off topic they will be marked as Spam. Once a domain is on the Akismet Spam list, a domain owner cannot post to all the blogs that use the Akismet filter.

I wonder if McAfee Siteadviser works with Akismet?

Andy Beard, Loren Baker, David Naylor, and I speak against Akismet and its false positive problems.

This is the complaint that PHSDL filed against Akismet http://www.phsdl.net/phsdl-vs-akismet-complaint.p…

Let's block real Spam not commentators and Webmasters.

David, I just checked Yahoo natural search and AnyCoupons.com is coming up clean in the search results.

So we got McAfee and Yahoo natural search fixed.

I hope the paid search gets fixed ASAP for you.

Hot**

Dear Yahoo: You’re Fired http://tinyurl.com/3w9a99

So it looks like some of the red warnings I have come down. Many remain. To sum it up:

McAfee: Retesting is taking place only because I posted on a well-read blog.

Yahoo natural search and Paid Inclusion: Yahoo is reindexing the site only because Outrider put so much pressure on Yahoo.

Yahoo Search Marketing: We are still blacklisted and are getting no calls returned from any level. I've escalated it and still can't get an answer.

I feel sorry for most sites that get a false positive. There is no way to get removed. If they manage to get retested by McAfee (good luck!), then they will have to wait at least a month to get the warnings removed by Yahoo… and may never be able to advertise through YSM.

Mr. Icahn, PLEASE HELP! [Note, I sent him a letter yesterday with the details. I thought he and his team would be interested. At least it's more ammo for him to use. And, no, I'm not expecting a reply... or a board seat.]

I have had a very similar experience with both Yahoo and McAfee. Mine has been more on the McAfee site.

I originally found our 'spam' rating a couple of months ago. I have contacted McAfee through forums, online chat, feedback forms, complaint addresses etc. Their complete lack of response and support on siteadvisor is very time-consuming and extremely frustrating.

I do have an issue with McAfee's lack of support.

I also take issue with Yahoo as well. I couldn't agree with you more about Yahoo's dismissive responses on how sites appear in their search results. It's not McAfee's problem what appears in Yahoo. It's Yahoo's problem.

I personally view it as yet another reason to use Google.

However, it can't be excused when many other people use Yahoo and a business has to have a marketing/search presence there.

If there is anyone at McAfee that can help me get our site rating corrected, please contact.

Angie, your site is yellow alert so it looks like your comment helped. Best of luck!

I've added another post about the flaws in McAfee's SiteAdvisor system and suggestions of how McAfee can fix them. I wanted to give suggestion to folks like Angie but there really are none. McAfee has a lot of work to do before we can expect improvement.

From an article about this in eWeek:

Priyank Garg, director of product management for Yahoo Search, said one of the reasons the company launched the feature in beta was because it was not sure it had caught all the issues.

I appreciate Priyank agreeing with me. It's too bad he and his team did not treat it that way at launch. I should not have gotten the e-mails from Gabriel if this truly were being treated as beta by Yahoo. Then again, the team at Outrider shouldn't have had to make more than one call to Yahoo if this were being treated as beta by Yahoo.

Yahoo needs to learn how to launch new services correctly and how to treat its users and the victims of its mismanagement.

I had a nice conversation with Priyank yesterday. I was impressed that he contacted me. While he had his reasons for implementing each step of SearchScan the way he did, he listened to my concerns about his product and the implications his decisions had on my business. I give him a lot of credit for taking that step. I hope to see positive changes at Yahoo based on our conversation.

David,

I skimmed this piece (having returned from a stay at my friendly neighborhood hospital) but let me add an important caveat. In order for McAffee to scan sites, rogue or legitimate, they have to use bots. The 60 million dollar question- Do THEY obey robots.txt ?

I am willing to bet they do not. Best practice anyone?

regards,
Wayne

The first time we noticed our site had been given a red spam rating was when I typed our name in Yahoo and found a nasty warning tag beside our name. We have never engaged in spam e-mail, and would not have the need to. I have no idea where McAfee gets their information from, but their technology is severely flawed. It is costing our company money in potential lost revenue and the only response we have received from McAfee is that our site would be retested in eight weeks. Eight weeks! This is completely irresponsible of McAfee, and not smart business either. I will make sure to stay clear of Yahoo in the future because of their association with McAfee.

What a fine mess they have created…

There is a nice article on ChannelWeb.

Angie & Eric, I need to warn you that your blood will boil as McAfee claims that it quickly retests whenever a website notifies it about a false positive. If only that were true.

Again, you can read more about SiteAdvisor on my other post. This one really is about Yahoo.

To give an update, one week after Yahoo admitted that a mistake was made and AnyCoupons is not a spammer, the red warning was removed. The final page to have it was our Privacy Policy. Nice touch, eh?

Two weeks after our feed was reinstated to Paid Inclusion. Why the extra two week? I don't know.

Pending is YSM. As predicted, we need to go to Editorial again. What I didn't realize was that we have a lot of old campaigns (remember, long-standing relationship) which need to be updated based on changed standards (e.g. the Short Description is required now). YSM is helping update but we are again paying in our time and delays in getting our listings reinstated.

I helped build what is now YSM (don't worry, there are several people whom I give more credit to and am willing to name them), and I am at the point of walking as an advertiser. It really is a shame.

WOW – I certainly haven't had contact with anyone at either Yahoo or McAfee with an attitude or approach as indicted by the quoted comments. If that was truly my experience – a few days to a couple of weeks… my story would be different. Wouldn't that be nice if that's truly how they operated.

But here it is – 8 months of being flagged as a spammer (4-5 months since I found out) – and I cannot get resolution.

I think they are extremely disorganized. For most companies that big actual resolutions and customer service are a very low priority.

Yes, McAfee did update our site to 'yellow' amazingly after I posted my original comment here. But it is just staying at Yellow and Yahoo either doesn't mark 'yellow' sites and/or doesn't update their ratings in a timely fashion, because we are still marked red on yahoo.

What I think is really funny is how the comments in the article say there are very few false positives. lol – how would they even know? They don't have any mechanism in place to tell them that.

Thought I would post another quick update.

Seems that yahoo has removed the 'red' rating from –some– of the pages cataloged for crye-leike.com. I cannot figure out a pattern for how they have removed/kept the red warning. There is still a red warning on many deep links and subdomains, but not on just the main home page. It is still not updated correctly, but interesting there has been an update.

They really need to look at that too… the application of penalty on all pages/subdomains not necessarily even associated with the page/site they 'tested'.

We have not enjoyed the same success as Angie and David in having our situation resolved. Our site has not been tested in over a year, and the results at that time do not warrant our site being labelled as dangerous to visit. We have never sent spam, period! But because McAfee says that we do we are losing business and our reputation at the same time. If things are not corrected soon we will be exploring legal options to correct this situation.

Interesting update here…. I posted a comment on Yahoo's blog post about SiteAdvisor integration

(http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000578.html). My comment did not get posted live….however after the comment was posted more of our pages were removed from the 'harmful' index label.

It looks like Yahoo has still not updated all of the pages indexed on our sites. Primiarily looks like all of the pdf files in the search results are still flagged harmful. There are some other subdomains as well. So I'm still not sure of their logic for partially removing some flags, but not others.

Still no update on the McAfee side. However I thought I would post the link to Yahoo's blog in case anyone here wants to try sending in a comment over there as well.

I want to chime in with a "me too".

Yahoo has posted a false “Unsolicited Emails” warning associated with our website, http://www.rumford.com, when searching for “Rumford fireplaces”. The warning is generated by Yahoo’s partner, McAfee SiteAdvisor. False because SiteAdvisor says they made that determination by “entering our e-mail address on this site”. Problem is, we have no forms or any other way to automatically enter an email message. I do all the site maintenance manually in html and sweep all the pages onto the Internet myself.

Thinking that SiteAdvisor had somehow made a simple mistake, I tried to contact them by phone and email – to no avail. After a month of trying, I have not gotten to anyone who will listen. Rather, I get transferred from one anonymous customer relations person to another. Same so far with McAfee and Yahoo. I even tried to reach "Shane" without success through another blog.

So I have complained to the Washington Attorney General and the California and Texas Better Business Bureau and have hired a lawyer – just to try to get someone in charge to talk with me.

I have also spent some time surfing the blogs to see what others think about McAfee and Yahoo. I learned that McAfee falsely targets many websites with their faulty but arrogantly defended technology – and then blames their victims. There is plenty of discussion about the websites McAfee has falsely red tagged on several blogs, such as http://ycorpblog.com/2008/05/05/do-you-know-where… and http://www.crn.com/security/208401061 and http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_H…

I also discovered at http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2006-3.htm that McAfee paid a $50 million penalty to settle a lawsuit filed against them by the SEC for fraud.

If you have any helpful advice or would like to join us in a lawsuit please contact me.

Jim Buckley

360 385 9974

buckley@rumford.com

Okay, an hour after "Jim" informed me that rumford.com would be "moved to a 'green' rating upon our next data release" I received the message below from Kimberly, who has been dealing with our Better Business Bureau Complaint against McAfee.

Kimberly apparently is not allowed to admit that McAfee made a mistake. She won't deal with the fact that McAfee could not have posted a test email on our website (which is what they say they did) and that the warning they associated with our website had to be a mistake.

Kimberly or Jim or Marcus or Edgar or Aaron or Edgar (all members of the "Executive Services Team" who have been passing me around) may have actually gotten the mistake corrected for me but can't admit it so they say we were re-tested. They all seem like nice people. I hope they get jobs with a decent company some day where they are allowed to be honest.

I think it's interesting that Kimbely gave me the address of McAfee's legal department, which we already had and is easy enough to find. Probably the legal department will issue us a similar company line about not providing the methods or the basis for their ratings. I think we can get that in court where we will argue that McAfee is guilty of defamation and they will have to present some argument or evidence to show that their statement "we entered our email address on their website" is not a prima facie lie.

Thread-Topic: Better Business Bureau Complaint (McAfee) Case#289228(Ref#11-205400-289228-3-201)

Thread-Index: Acjjjf5p887XGRuWQAqkhRa/IE61KQAGzFYQ

From:

To:

Mr. Buckley,

McAfee's position is has been expressed clearly to you, I'm sorry that you find this unsatisfactory. I'm unsure how else to say that your site was tested and received a rating based on that result. When the site is retested if no forms are found and your site warrants an adjustment, the rating will be changed.

There are numerous factors involved in the testing process and McAfee will not provide the criteria or steps involved to you. That could jeopardize the outcome of our tests to your site and other sites as well.

As I've indicated to you previously, McAfee's Executive Management and Operations Management teams are aware of your concerns and our responses to you regarding those concerns.

Your lawyer can contact McAfee's legal department directly via mail at McAfee, Inc. (Legal Department) 5000 Headquarters Drive, Plano TX 75024.

Kind regards,

Kimberly R. Smith

Executive Services Team

Kimberly_Smith@McAfee.com
http://www.mcafee.com
972-987-2119

Jim-

I feel your pain. I forwarded your comment to McAfee and Yahoo. They are following the comments of this post but I wanted to make sure they got it.

Someone in my office just had a telling comment about this: Welcome to the Spanish Inquisition!

-David

I have 2 non-commercial websites that have received false positives. One site was tagged after I began making inquiries about the first site. While I can't prove that an email address wasn't put on the snowwowl.com website, I know none was put on the artmckellips.com site because I manually make the entries.

I have written about my ordeal extensively at http://snowwowl.com/flashnewscontents.html#boycot…. You can read it there, rather than go through it all again here. I tried going through the proper channels.

If one reads the email above from Kimberly Smith, she states that Jim's site will be retested "If no forms are found". So they falsely accuse a site and now he can't have forms or they won't retest it.

I was told that I must remove ALL of the email addresses from the sites, as well as removing all of the email fields on all forms. The snowwowl.com site has over 1700+ pages. Every email address on the site is voluntary. We even warn people about including their email address, because it will be made public on the site.We have: writers that don't have websites that want their addresses published; Powwow information with email addresses so people can get more information; email addresses in the GuestBook so people can exchange information; and email addresses in our Flash news section on current Native American issues, so people can contact people for support and write the proper people involved in the situation. To remove these would be to end the site as a place to exchange information.

On another blog, I read that two sites had indeed removed all of their email addresses. One was a site where people from a certain Naval ship could reconnect and the other was a site that enabled adult adoptees to connect with their birth parents. This means they have both ended one of the main purposes of their sites. Now the bad news–one was given the "green" rating…the other was not.

When this first came to our attention-the Mac Afee details "claimed" that both websites had their email address on it and that once it was on the site they received the same 12 spam emails in a week. How can that be if the address was only on one site? Could it be the email addresses just happened to receive the emails and it had nothing to do with being on any site? As soon as I asked this question, I was told to remove all email addresses on the site before they would retest.

I recently went to the details again and the results have changed. How can that be? They refused to retest the site, because they went to the site and "saw "an email address. So how can the results change, unless it is because the same results showed the flaw in their testing?

So it comes down to this. We are falsely accused, then Jim can't have forms, and I can't have email addresses and who knows what Mac Afee will come up with next. If we are willing to gut our sites, they will re-test. They didn't test the first time.

I did my own test–I opened a new Yahoo email account, and on the first day I had 8 spam emails. So is Yahoo selling email addresses. Is Yahoo a spammer, because they are the only ones who know the address besides myself.

I also brought this to their attention. However, every time I make something public on the website, things change. First the "details information". Then last week, three of our writers, who have had their email addresses on the website for at least 2 years received their first spam email about "hooking up", claiming they found their "profile" on snowwowl.com. All the same spam email from a yahoo.ca email address…I have copies.

I won't be removing my email addresses, because I refuse to allow Mac Afee to dictate what can or can't be on my site. Especially because they can't prove their claims and all the false positives. I have that luxury, because while Yahoo is damaging the reputation of my site, it is not costing me revenue as it has others. I do have the stats showing that the warning is keeping people from coming to the site from Yahoo searches. And now those people won't get the information, some of which is no where else on the Internet.

I will participate in any class action lawsuit and I have started a "Boycott Yahoo and Mac Afee" campaign. They did this to increase their numbers, so let's decrease their numbers.

If I were you David, I wouldn't give them one penny from my ad budget. They showed their colors.

David,

Thank you for your blog and for forwarding my comments to McAfee and Yahoo.

I just received the message below saying we would be moved to a “green” rating. Perhaps I have you to thank.

To: buckley@rumford.com
From: McAfee SiteAdvisor Support
Subject: Erroneous &#34SapmAssassin score of 10&#34 for
http://www.rumford.com
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:14:56 -0400

Hello,

Quick update. Current test data indicates that this site will be moved to a ‘green’ rating upon our next data release.

Sincerely,

Jim
Avert Services
McAfee SiteAdvisor

Of course I have no idea who “Jim” is nor if it will really happen. And I’m still angry about the loss of business, all the time it has taken, and my inability to get to anyone at Yahoo or McAfee willing to be responsible.

I see that AnyCoupons seems to now be free of the dreaded Yahoo warning. What are you going to do now? Get on with life? Maintain your blog to help the rest of us? Are you interested in a class action suit?

Best,
Jim Buckley

Jim-

Yes, I have tried to get on with life but also am still fighting the good fight.

AnyCoupons was switched to a yellow warning… maybe we’ll get green some day.

In the meantime, I will continue to make noise about this. I haven’t stopped. There are too many websites still facing this problem and Yahoo hasn’t changed its ways yet..

-David

In my mind this feature of mcafee and yahoo is not all that great if it was working properly. I don't see how it helps either one of them make much more money. It just can't lead to much $$$$ on their side. It seems to me to be all political. It's just a shame when companies get too policitical and can't get out of the mess. The system they have is obviously not working. They don't have a way to support it. No one knows what to say. It's a round about. I can't see how they would be able to fix a political problem this big and between two companies. Seems the best thing would be to just take it down.

It isn't like we have a choice about showing up on Yahoo search results.It would be better to NOT show up on their search engine than to have the warning. My site snowwowl.com comes up on the first page for many searches, but what good is it to have a good site, that has information, that people have been coming to for 7 years, if the first thing they see is "Potentially harmful websites" and then "warning:unsolicited emails". We have spent years building our status in the search engines, to have Yahoo/Mac Afee tear it down. My site is non-commercial. I don't have the funds to hire a lawyer.

Yahoo has marked all 1700+ pages on the search results. Pages that have no email addresses, pages that don't have forms or even links to forms.

I just came across this post, but my experience has pretty much been the same as everyone else here. Just without the resolution. It's been unresolved for a few months after McAfee mistakenly marked one of our downloads as invalid. I've contacted them multiple times in every way possible and only received one arrogant return letter almost taunting us to sue them.

It seems to me that McAfee would do better to remove the service rather than provide blatant misinformation to users who trust them. Thanks for the insight into McAfee's and Yahoo's business practices. Funny, I trusted McAfee before.

Here it is, July 2010 and the problem still exits. I'm another victom. As others, I contacted McAfee & was told to contact Yahoo. Contacted Yahoo & was told to contact McAfee. I just have a tiny part time home business and have only been using the internet a short time. These e-mails are supposedly from Nov/Dec '09 and Feb. '10…this is July.

Has anyone found any other information or ways to fix this problem? Anyone have a contact that will get action?

Jackie, I'm sorry to hear that you are having to deal with it. I can't comment about it much. What I can say is that at a minimum the Yahoo part should go away this year when Microsoft takes over Yahoo's search results. That still leaves you with the McAfee Red Alert. Try contacting McAfee and see if they will retest.

Jackie,

Sorry to hear that you are still dealing with Yahoo/McAfee abuse. They have left me alone since 2008 but it still makes me angry when I think about it. Yahoo and McAfee – maybe most corporations – are as large as some countries and run like North Korea – the right to vote only by stockholders, all power from a central committee, no balance of powers, no presumption of innocence, no transparency.

David Lewis' observation that the problem may go away when Microsoft takes over may be correct but, again we are relying on the benevolence of a big corporation – an even bigger corporation – and can only hope that they treat us fairly.

I'd like to bring some accountability and the light of day to Yahoo and McAfee and even Microsoft. Toward that end, I would be happy to lobby elected officials or join a class action suit to address these corporate abuses. At the very least those of us who have been wronged should have a way to get straight answers and resolution short of a very expensive lawsuit.

Thanks David & Jim!

I thought I give you an update. McAfee has actually been pretty good about fixing this. They have agreed to retest and I will hear about the results in about 8 weeks.

It's going to be a very embarassing 8 weeks! I've subscribed to my own opt in just to be sure that all is good…although I know it is.

It would be a much better service if they would contact the site if spam has been received and help to fix the problem, instead of ruining the reputation of good people.

I'll let you know how it goes…

Jackie,

You say McAfee has actually been pretty good about fixing this. They have agreed to retest and I will hear about the results in about 8 weeks.?! They damage your reputation and wast your time and, even if they do remove your warning that's good enough?

That's sort of like the McAfee limo speeding by your house smashes into your car legally parked on the street and then they tell you that when they speed by in 8 weeks, if they don't hit your car again, they will forget the whole thing!

I would hope that we could find a way to hold incompetent arrogant corporations more responsible. I would still support you in any legislative or legal remedy. At the very least I would shine the light of day and keep telling the story as publicly as possible and not settle for less than an apology, some sort of restitution such as an on line retraction and a promise to change their policy, as you suggest, o contact the site if spam has been received and help to fix the problem, instead of ruining the reputation of good people.

Good luck and keep us posted.

That sucks, McAfee isn't that good of an anti-virus program, there are much better out there.

WOW, you guys are really technical. I used my Yahoo account to help the Earth Day event in Bali, Indonesia earlier this year, maybe over 4 days, and sent out in invitation to contacts, NGOs, businesses to support it.

I've been 'outcast' as SPAMmer ever since and have to enter that stupid code after every email. We use it occasionally and this is flatly ridiculous. I've reported it and replied to their requests for information and over 4 months nothing has improved. And all our outgoing mails go into recepient's SPAM folder – what the …! We started using Yahoo because our domain name emails were going into SPAM folders. Then this. Is all linked in some way?

It got worse when I realized that my Bali husband's email – never sent bulk, not linked in any way to our business address (except perhaps sent in one email) also requires this – this is flat ABUSE by yahoo (notice no capital Y because they're no longer my favorite).

Is this prejudice against Indonesia?

Can anyone help? This is abusive, ridiculous, and unprofessional on yahoo's part.