I have an old site, using a plain contact form. On Monday i'd had 20 viagra emails all from randomly named gmail accounts. This morning I had over 100, with more arriving every 2 minutes or so. I added a basic turing test and it stopped immediately, so it's definitely bots at fault.

The thing is, it's become easy for the spammers to get their hands on gmail accounts. I've heard they are even using cheap labour just to beat the captchas on some email account signups, and the AI captcha progs are getting increasingly more sophisticated.

So it looks like capchas are dead - are turing (human intelligence) tests going to be a foolproof way to beat the spambots?

I'm so sick of spam, it makes me sick. Its the bane of the internet.

Capatcha's are even worse! Not only do they not work half the time. But half the time what you enter is not correct, because you cannot tell if its an uppercase letter / lowercase if a 5 is an S or a 0 and O etc...

They drive me nuts.

I get some viagra emails, but its all the Russian girls who want to marry me or are lonely tonight that are driving me nuts.

Once your email gets onto one of their lists that's the end of it.

What's worse is that my email address is used to send out notification emails to all my website members. So if any of them get a viral infection or something of the like and their address book is compromised, guess who gets on the list?

It seems like a never ending battle.

Stopping spam would be easy if they just used a damn spell checker on emails. Problem is all the illiterate people wouldn't be able to send emails anymore. Win / Win I say .

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Haha, Brilliant Gavin!