Adult emails are spam – and you can’t stop spam. Anybody who has your home or office address can send you letters and anybody who has your email address can send you spam. You don’t get much junk mail because it costs a lot to send. You will get lots of junk email because it costs nothing to send.
Email service providers such as Yahoo, Google and Microsoft filter out billions of spam emails per day. Only a few get through, and five to 20 per day is not an unusual number.
However, the ones that get through should arrive in your spam folder. If you are seeing obvious adult spam emails in your inbox then either the filtering is turned off – which isn’t easy to do in Yahoo Mail – or the filters are failing.
Unfortunately, spam filtering is a tricky business. If the filters are loose, you will see a few spam emails in your inbox. If the filters are too fierce, then legitimate emails will end up in your spam box.
A few services offer better control. Plus.net, for example, lets you select the aggressiveness of the spam filter on a scale from 1 to 5. I haven’t seen this option on free email services such as Google’s Gmail, Microsoft’s Outlook and Yahoo Mail.
In my experience, Yahoo’s filtering is a little loose, while Gmail is so fierce that it produces a lot of false positives. Which you prefer is a matter of taste, but if you want aggressive spam filtering, you could switch to Gmail. The drawback is that you may have to look in your spam folder every day or two or you could miss some important emails.