Yahoo! Mail, CAPTCHA, and %*(&^!
My wife's been emailing me gift ideas for my daughter, sometimes the email is just a link. So I went to respond to one of these with a link of my own to a review site suggesting the vendor's customer service might not be the best. Maybe responding to an email with a single link and a short comment is spam-like behavior; I clicked send and was greeted with a CAPTCHA, saying this was to prevent spammers from using Yahoo! Mail. W...T...F. I've had my mail account with them for what, 6,7 years? Granted, I don't pay for the account (well, I'm an Oddpost customer, so maybe in some way, I did pay for it). The worst is yet to come. Apparently, I couldn't read the CAPTCHA or fat-fingered the response, and got the message:
Character String Verification Error
You need to pass the verification test to send any more email.
Your message has not been sent and will not be saved.
So I failed to read the screwed up CAPTCHA they posted, and they delete my email. Are they trying to drive me away? If I had a premium account, would they skip this check?
I can't say in words how much I hate CAPTCHA. Ironic, I know, but consider this: even though this blog is CAPTCHA "protected", I still have received a few spams, in exchange for a much lower comment rate than at my old weblog. So what's a usability issue for me, what amounts to data loss, is just a cost of doing business for a spammer. Thanks, Yahoo!