Text based CAPTCHAs are no longer able to fool the bots. How long will it be before they can handle image based CAPTCHA’s as well? And is reducing your spam worth alienating a percentage of your users? The harder it is for a computer to solve, the more inconvenient it becomes for legitimate users. This results in less users. Many have pointed out that using CAPTCHAs to stop spam bots is doomed to fail and that we should use a different approach. Simple questions are often used effectively. Perhaps flash or javascript can help. But are these really solutions or only temporary measures to prolong the inevitable?

It’s like an arms race between spammers and spam blockers. Spammers aren’t just using bots anymore either. The new trend is to buy or outsource a cheap labor force to break CAPTCHAs. These data workers often earn much more solving CAPTCHAs than doing legitimate work.

The future of this arms race between spammers and spam blockers looks bleak. However, some see a silver lining to the spam problem in that we can harness the spammers to solve important AI (Artificial Intelligence) problems by using specific types of CAPTCHAs. Some of these problems include OCR (Optical Character Regognition), Voice Recognition, etc.

That would be great for AI, but does that mean your inbox will never be free of Wholesale Watches, fake Bank Account updates, Discount Pharmacy, Multiple Orgasms, and Online Diplomas? I hope not.