Spam

About nine month ago I wrote an article about funny CAPTCHAS (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) floating around the web.

As a little remark I pointed out that CAPTCHAS might be a temporary solution against comment spamming, automatic account generation, and so on, but that these might easily be bypassed with some cheap tricks:

I just read that SPAM is getting 30 today. Congratulations!

On May 3rd, 1978, about 400 mailboxes got flooded by the first unsolicited email advertisement in history! According to heise.de it is estimated that the current spam volume is about 100 billion spam mails per year. The signal to noise ratio is as low as 15%.

Rather old, but I just read that Mailinator offers a bunch of alternate domains for its free, save from sign-up, and easy to use Spam-Mail service.

Spam is an omnipresent problem on the Internet these days. Not only email is affected with approximately 100 billion Spam mails a day, but also search engines, instant messaging services, forums, and blog comments.
One temporary solution to reduce Spam in wikis, forums and blogs are reverse Turing tests or Captchas (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart).