The end of free webmail

Reports in recent weeks like this and this that software programs are now able to crack those annoying CAPTCHA character recognition tests on major free webmail sites like Yahoo, GMail, and Windows Live are a big deal.

Some of the spammers now have very fast and accurate character recognition programs, while others may be using the obvious solution of paying humans to recognize the human-readable characters.

The prove-you-are-a-human strategy is fundamentally flawed, because it cannot tell the difference between a human who wants to use free email to send a few personal messages a day, and a desparately poor human in a developing country paid a few dollars a day to set up an account for a spammer to send a million messages a day. It will never be cost-effective to stop such activity.

The webmail providers will eventually have to accept the fact that they cannot prevent spammers from setting up accounts. That leaves them with few options. One option would be to severely limit the number of email recipients per day on free email to the point where such accounts would be unattractive to spammers, but still attractive to most users. But is there such a limit? That remains to be seen. Perhaps the only way to stop spammers is to charge per email recipient for all email sent from an account. That would put an end to free email entirely.

Such a move would not necessarily put an end to GMail and other webmail services. Having a personal email address that stays the same when you change ISPs is worth paying for. Now it's up to the IT industry to figure out how to make it pay off.