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Submitted by: Bill Hickey
NCVA List Master

NRT-0472 Anti-Spam Services Block Gmail and Yahoo:

The growing abuse of free web mail services to send spam has led anti-spam services to block messages from Gmail and Yahoo, according to an online press report. Over recent months, information security firms reported that Windows Live CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) used by Hotmail, and the equivalent system at Gmail, have been broken, circumvented by automated systems.

CAPTCHA helps to ensure that online accounts cannot be created until a user correctly identifies letters depicted in an image, a tactic designed to frustrate spammers and other e-criminals from using automated sign-up tools.

Anti-spam filtering services, such as MessageLabs, have responded by obstructing or slowing down the connection.

An analysis of spam trends in February 2008 by MessageLabs revealed that 4.6% of all spam originates from web mail-based services. The proportion of spam from Gmail increased two-fold from 1.3% in January to 2.6% in February, most of which advertised pornographic web sites. Yahoo Mail was the most abused web mail service, responsible for sending 88.7% of all web mail-based spam.

(channelregister.co.uk 10APR08)

Last Modified: Saturday, 03-May-2008 10:43:29 EDT