The Importance Of Captcha To Preventing Email Spam

By Author: Groshan Fabiola
Total Articles: 2671
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For those of you that may not know, a captcha is a set of letters and or numbers presented under the form of a small picture. The trick is that the captcha containing letters and or numbers is distorted badly. The captcha has been designed to be an important weapon in the battle against email spam. Basically, the captcha is designed to be able to make a distinction between human started queries and automated software queries, and help separate them accordingly. This system, which requires all users to solve a captcha before being able to create an email account and sending emails has revolutionized the fight against email spam and has proven to be quite a reliable ally in the sense that, up until know, there were no software applications created able of being to solve captchas.

The first step for a company that wishes to start an email spam campaign is to create a large number of free email accounts, usually on the largest sites, such as Yahoo, GMail, and so on. Creating email accounts ranging from 5,000 to 100,000 completely through human operators was something unconceivable just until years ago. Before the apparition ...
... of the all powerful captcha, anyone wanting to start an email spam campaign, could do so in just a day or two by setting up an automated email creation software application. All you needed to do, basically, was to input some variables, like various ranges for the name, and other details. Email spam was something that absolutely anyone could start and carry out before the advent of the captcha system. The captcha system has worked perfectly since the first day of deployment, and automated email account creation has not been possible since as all large email service providers have decided to implement captcha technology in the account set up processes on their websites.

The role of captcha is no longer limited to the prevention of automated email account creation. Instead, today the captcha system is used in all sorts of online situations where the input of a human is absolutely needed in order to perform a specific task. A good example of a website section where captcha has proven to be equally as important as with the prevention of email spam, is online forms. These forms, while they can also be used for spamming purposes, are usually used by search engine optimization companies, and even private website owners to submit links directed to their respective websites, or even product promotion. The captcha system has evolved quite notably in the past period as freelancing software developers have joined efforts to find ways to defeat captchas. This is why captcha became much more distorted, and some other options were introduced, such as backward writing and so on. I guess that it will be an ongoing war between the largest software developers trying to protect the general public from email spam and dodgy companies trying to promote their clients whilst keeping their costs at an absolute minimum.

For more resources about Captcha or about email spam, please review this page http://www.thespamwar.com.