There have been reports over the last few weeks that CAPTCHA the popular tool used by many websites to thwart spammers is being attacked. CAPTCHA is the hard to read squiggly text that users are asked to decipher in an effort to tell real human users apart from automated bots. Free email services such as Gmail, Yahoo or Live Mail all use some form of CAPTCHA to prevent spammers from utilizing automated scripts to create large numbers of user accounts to be then used for spam-mail.

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Bob Spurzem on the Ferris blog sees the same exponential pattern that Gordon Moore predicted for electronic circuits to apply to the growth of email.

“Consider email quantity. Where once we sent and received only a handful of emails daily, today we routinely send and receive hundreds of emails. You might argue that the volumes are increasing exponentially.

Finally, consider mailbox size. A 10MB mailbox was once the norm and was replaced with 100-200MB mailboxes in recent years. Today users expect multigigabyte mailboxes, made famous by Google’s Gmail.”

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Most of us know about phishing by now. Those annoying emails coming from a bank you don’t even do business with, telling you in poor grammar and spelling to update your account settings by visiting a website with a strange looking URL. The more clever ones, such as the genuine-looking messages posing as eBay or PayPal customer support, have lured many people into exposing their account credentials and still pose a significant threat to the uninformed.

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eWeek brings this story from last week’s Gartner ITxpo in Las Vegas. During an overview presentation of the UCC market, Bern Elliot, Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst, made the claim that companies must invest in UCC tools in order to attract and retain top talent.

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Just in case there has been any doubt, here is another example of how all electronic communications can be used in court. This eWeek article covers the recent subpoena issued by New York City, to obtain text-messaging records and recipient information related to protests during the Republican National Convention in July of 2004. The event was orchestrated through the now infamous TXTmob tool, which was created by Tad Hirsch, a doctorial candidate at MIT.

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We all receive emails from automated services such as payment reminders, news alerts or other opt-in communications. The emails are computer-generated and the sender typically includes a notice asking the recipient not to reply to the message, since the sending account is not being monitored. Apparently, some companies go one step further and put an invalid return address in the message envelope.

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