Another interesting solution that would be nice if more people used it is hashing. Programs like hashcash basically make the computer do some calculations in order to send an email. Since humans don’t type and send emails extremely fast, it’s not a problem for us, but spammers wouldn’t be able to do the calculations for the millions (or billions?) of messages sent. Of course, then you run into problems with companies sending out legitimate newsletters.

I saw, I gave you the wrong link, is http://www.pidware.com/pidkey.php (without . at the end) If you are like me, I hate spam and now… I relax

Mya

I use a spam blocker, the approach is different, it doesn’t intend to analyse an email. This spam blocker uses a new pidkey technology. It’s too long to explain but you can see an explanation http://www.pidware.com/pidkey.php. The point is… the machine (computer) competes with human brain, computer no match with that. So maybe it’s time to look elsewhere.

Mya

CAPTCHA’s are definitely one of the most commonly used solutions because they’re so easy. Unfortunately, there are some significant problems with them. Vision-impaired users can’t use them, people using command line browsers (e.g., Lynx) can’t see them, and small, and portable devices often cannot use them (e.g., phones and PDA’s which might have too small of screens, too low of resolution, or may even have images disabled to save bandwidth/memory). I also see people who implement CAPTCHA’s incorrectly, using an obvious hash that can be cracked by a computer faster than a real user can type in the image’s characters.

Hopefully this excessively long post will help you (and others) when the spammers become a bit more sophisticated. In some ways, it’s good that there are so many easy targets (keeps their eyes off the more challenging sites to spam), but I wonder how much those sites encourage these people…

One thing I didn’t mention is that you can also shut down a lot of spammer’s sites. Oftentimes, they use sites like JubiiBlog where they can quickly set up a page with spam advertisements or JavaScript forwarding, and you can simply contact the support team with the offending sites. I’ve done that quite a bit in the past few weeks while analyzing spam I receive through my comment form, and I can only hope it irritates the spammer. It takes a lot less time to find a customer support email address and forward on the spam sites than it does for them to find new sites that are vulnerable to their techniques.