Archive for the ‘E-mail’ Category:
reCAPTCHA
In one of my previous posts, I highlighted the use of images compared to traditional text as a better way to protect your e-mail address from Spammers.
reCAPTCHA brings this to another higher level. Instead of directly revealing the image file containing the user’s e-mail address, reCAPTCHA requires a person to successfully type two words in oder to obtain the requested e-mail address.
The image displayed below is one of the ways many websites use to authenticate that a person instead of a bot is completing a transaction through the internet.
reCAPTCHA, however, requires a user to type two instead of a single word for verification.
Why two words?
Besides providing its users the ability to hide their e-mail addresses from spammers, the image verification process is actually utilizing the brain power of millions in digitalizing books. A normal reCAPTCHA process goes like this:
A user is asked to type the two words. One of the words has already been solved by reCAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA has the solution to it. However, the other word has not been solved and this is where the user’s comes into play. By utilizing this method, this project aims to solve the imperfection of Optical Character Recognition tools that do not translate handwritten text to computer characters well enough.
The CAPTCHA Project
The CAPTCHA project is a project of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. The project claims that over 60 million puzzles are solved daily using the brain power of people like you and me.
I believe it is only time that seperates us from digitalizing all the books available now. Preserving books in the digital form is more cost effective in the long run and most importantly, they will be accessible by our future generation.
Here is a CAPTCHA that helps me protect my e-mail address.
tian…@gmail.com
Yahoo: Ymail and the return of Rocketmail
Yahoo INC (NASDAQ:YHOO) just announced that they will re-open new e-mail accounts registration under rocketmail.com and its newly acquired ymail.com domain. This move is seen as a good and strategic one as the current domain (yahoo.com) is saturated with so many e-mail accounts that new users are finding a hard time getting hold of good names to start a new e-mail account.
It is a normal scenario for new users to pad their usernames with numbers such as davidleong2008 in order to register for a new e-mail account. However, Yahoo has not started the registration process for these two domains the last time I checked their websites.
Update : Yahoo has just started the registration process for ymail and rocketmail. Get your favorite login names before they are taken.
Protect your e-mail account from SPAMMERS
I have come across a lot of internet users who publish their e-mail accounts on their blogs or websites in the form of user [at] webmailcompany [dot] com. From my personal experience, 1 out of 3 personal blogs that I’ve come across use this method in the hope of avoiding robots that crawl for e-mail addresses. I highly doubt the effectiveness of such method. By googling *[at] gmail [dot] com, I managed to obtain 12 million e-mail accounts in 0.16seconds (The asterisk represents a wildcard character that accepts zero or more characters in replace of it)
Imagine what a professional spammer can do with 12 million gmail e-mail accounts! And bear in mind that we’re only talking about e-mail accounts that belongs to gmail. A simply Ruby or Perl script can extract all the information that google has indexed and replace every [at] with @ and [dot] with a period. A spammer would definitely be satisfied with this huge collection of e-mail addresses that Google has indexed and can now concentrate more on his malicious spamming activities.
Note that this also applies to *@gmail.com queries on Google. In fact, Google managed to return 99 million hits for this query.
A better way to protect yourself is to hand write your e-mail address and then embed it in an image file. At this time, most computers are not very smart in reading hand written images yet. Take this image and place it as a link on your website/blog so that users will need to physically click on it to view your e-mail address.
I used Windows paint to create this.
clickhere@gmail.com