I have a Yahoo! e-mail account and I’ve had it for quite a while now. I think when I first got it I used it to sign up for stuff on the internet. Now, the account is slowly edging towards being unusable. I know I don’t have a serious problem though because I only get about 100 spam messages a day. I have heard of people getting thousands! When I can be bothered, I go in there and delete all the spam. Yahoo! is pretty good and manages to identify the large majority of spam that I get (some does make it into my inbox).

What seems to be the case is that a certain type of spam message is the “message of the day” (or maybe 2 days). After this, I guess the spammers realise that most of their e-mails are getting junked (a lot of people automatically delete junk messages without even looking at them, which can be problematic if it’s a false positive). They then change the message so that it’s a different message (in an attempt to get through the spam filter). I don’t bother looking at the actual messages, but you can see how spam filters work because all the same type of message (with a similar subject line) gets put into the junk folder.
Today’s message has the subject “sender’s first name check this” (without the quotation marks).

Yesterday’s message has the subject “it’s me sender’s first name“