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Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Gmail Busted, Humanness Suspected

I noticed a few weeks ago that some of my Gmail messages were being lost. A few were kicked back to me labeled Spam. And a few correspondents reported that my messages were being placed in their spam folder. Of course some people, like me, rarely look at their Spam folder, so they never saw my messages. Unexpected mail being lost. Disconcerting to say the least. Snail mail was becoming more reliable. Should I abandon Gmail? I searched around to figure out why. It turns out the the Captcha which Google uses to test to see if you are human when you apply for a Gmail account had been broken. So Spammers were getting Gmail accounts, and creating a new deluge of Spam. Spam filters were reacting by blocking some kinds of Gmail. For example a test showed that a Gmail message containing any kind of URL was more likely to be blocked than one without. Guess I have to wait for a solution. Better tests for human-ness are now needed.

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