Those Yahoo "Captcha" Codes

At the end of EVERY e-mail???

I hit send and there they are. Is there any way to disable that or is this a random curse?

Thanks

Q

What CAPTCHAs?

I just sent an email from one of my Yahoo accounts and all I had to do was click the SEND button.

To finish sending this message and help us fight spam, please enter the character string as it is shown in the box below.

Trouble seeing this image?
Character string shown: Character string shown:

Why do I have to do this?
This step helps Yahoo! prevent spammers from using Yahoo! Mail, and helps to ensure that your email will be delivered.

Character string verification technology developed in collaboration with the Captcha Project at Carnegie Mellon University.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

This happens after I press SEND after every e-mail. Every day this week.

Thanks

Q

Either it’s something new that they’re testing to prevent spam, or you did something which got you pegged as a potential spammer. If you’ve been sending lots of emails with links in them to large lists of people, then I’d suggest stopping that and emailing Yahoo to tell them that you’re a real person, not a spambot, and to ask them to disable the spamguard on your account. If you haven’t been doing that, then most likely the captcha check is there to stay forever. While annoying, in the end the world is a better place for fighting spam.

The only reason Yahoo has to do that is that their spam detectors are really bad. It’s the reason I moved to Gmail. You can actually get a Gmail account and set it up where it will send email from your Yahoo account–you’ll just be sent a confirmation email. I don’t know if it can check your Yahoo email for you, though.

I guess that’s you and not me.

However, from January 2008:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9058000/Researcher_cracks_Yahoo_CAPTCHA_software?source=rss_topic17

That’s not necessarily meaningful. The amount of computation it takes to send a packet to an email server versus the amount of computation to download and scan an image for characters, then send the packet to the email server is probably a ratio of 1:5000 in terms of processor time. Assuming that a spambot PC cranks out as much email as it can, non-stop, all day, the total number of packets they can send is significantly reduced. They may get through the captcha 100% of the time, but they’re wasting time solving captchas that they’d rather be spending sending spam.

One tidbit about “captcha”'s that seems interesting to me is that some spammers who need to crack them simply run a porn site on the side! A Captcha is relayed in real-time to the porn site, where a human cracks it for free, just to view a porn picture, the captcha solution then relayed back automatically as the answer to the challenge from, e.g. Yahoo!

I don’t think that’s common anymore, though the technique you describe does work.

Most spammers use OCR and computational methods. The boutique outfits pay cheap labour to do it.