Yahoo Mail - Abuse Prevention vs. Usability

Yahoo Mail is a free email service which I like primarily for its 1 TB of storage capacity. I'm generally satisfied with Yahoo Mail--its ads are not too obtrusive, there are keyboard shortcuts to perform common actions like archiving emails, and its spam filter does a pretty good job (sometimes "a little too well" but that's another story). However, sometimes Yahoo Mail borders on annoying, and here is an example. Sometimes I come across an interesting story or video that I don't have time to read/watch at the moment, so I send myself the URL for future reference. When I use Yahoo Mail to send the URL, I get this message:

This occurs when the body contains only a URL, regardless of whether the subject line is populated. It doesn't occur every time I send just a URL, and I don't know how to predict when it will occur. I  do appreciate Yahoo's efforts to prevent spam, but when preventive efforts impede regular non-abusive users from doing what they want to do, that's when usability has been compromised.

I realize that there are many examples of when the masses are inconvenienced to screen for a small minority of offenders. Airport security checkpoints and border inspections come to mind. But is the presence of spam email enough justification to disallow sending of URLs via email where there are a multitude of ways that email can be used to send spam and commit more serious forms of abuse? How about if emails were intercepted only if the URLs had a poor Web of Trust reputation or if the URL had been associated with phishing attempts for the purpose of identity theft?

With Yahoo Mail's current implementation of abuse prevention, a spammer simply needs to add some text in addition to the URL in the body of the email, and presto--Yahoo's preventive measures are bypassed. Surely there must be a better way to fight spam?

I Want the Truth!

In the past few months I've been receiving a lot of unsolicited calls on my iPhone, so based on some online reviews I decided to see if Truecaller (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/truecaller-number-search-spam/id448142450?mt=8) would help me identify "spam" phone calls ahead of time. Truecaller leverages feedback from its user base to determine if calls are "spam" and populates its database from this feedback.  If a call originates from a phone number in the Truecaller spam database, I see this warning on my phone:

Based on a limited number of calls over the past 2 weeks, I estimate that roughly half of my spam calls had been correctly identified as such (true positives). For the most part, the other half of my spam calls slipped through Truecaller (false negatives), after which I dutifully reported those numbers to Truecaller.

Today I received a call which Truecaller identified as spam, only to find out later when listening to the voice message that it was an automated call from Kaiser Permanente reminding me to get a flu shot. To me, it felt like an error (false positive) for the call from Kaiser to be identified as spam. While I can understand that some folks would prefer not to receive flu shot reminders, appointment reminders, or other automated communication from Kaiser and would report it as spam, it felt to me like a legitimate call. This initially made me wonder if people simply do not value calls from their healthcare providers. I then hypothesized that it would be more appropriate for people to opt out of phone messages from Kaiser, but when I went to the Kaiser patient portal, I could find any settings to opt out of phone calls (there were settings to opt out of automated email messages). So from that perspective, maybe it was fair to label it as spam after all.

Overall, despite intercepting only about 50% of my spam calls, that's a lot better than 0%, so Truecaller is an app that will stay on my phone for the foreseeable future.