Yahoo! Groups and Generic Email Accounts

For a youth basketball league I help run, we’ve set up a Yahoo! Group for announcements and the like. I’ve been banging my head against the wall trying to attach one of my email accounts for the league (info@, and webmaster@), but Yahoo! Groups refused to let me, instead showing those accounts as “disabled”.

As a last resort (and this comes from a guy who works there), I contacted customer support who got back to me the following day. Apparently Yahoo! Groups has a restriction that prevents so-called “generic” email accounts from joining, presumably in the fight against spam.

Sure enough, search through the help turned up the topic What does Yahoo! Groups do to prevent spam abuse?, which in part states:

No generic addresses: Email addresses such as webmaster@domain.com or postmaster@domain.com cannot be used to join a group. Messages from Groups should be personal and should not use email addresses which commonly recycled within an organization. In addition, spammers commonly target these addresses. For all these reasons, we disallow their user on the service.

I’m not sure how restricting certain email accounts is going to help prevent spam in any way, but at least now I can work around the problem.

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