So, in case you were wondering about the progress of my abuse report to Yahoo!, I did indeed get a response within 48 hours, thanking me for my communication, assuring me that they'd investigate, and informing me that they wouldn't be letting me know about the outcome of that investigation, as they don't disclose information about action taken on another user's account with a third party.
Fair enough: it's the mechanism I'm interested in, not the fate of a single malicious group. Which, in this case, is still up, though the number of members has gone down to 11. Since it's quicker to delete a spam than unsubscribe (Yahoo! sends you a response requiring that you confirm that you really want to ), I guess that means people are actually taking the trouble to unsubscribe.
I suspect that Yahoo! will take more notice of abuse reports than the number of people unsubscribing in terms of evaluating the size of the problem, but submitting an abuse report is a lot more time-consuming, especially when you have to look at the Yahoo groups site if you want to know if the group has been cancelled.
David Harley
Director of Malware Intelligence
