Not good. Arstechnica.com writes about how spambots have cracked Windows Live Hotmail and Gmail's CAPTCHA disciplines. These services use CAPTCHA to prevent automated systems from signing up to their web email services. From there, the accounts can be manipulated into sending spam. Some ISPs have cut Gmail and Hotmail domains off, placing them on their block lists.
Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart ([[CAPTCHA]]) is used to slow down automated web-entry techniques in every service type from blogs (avoiding blog spam), URL spam on search engines to email account initiation services.
Here on Brockmann.com, the blog spammers were such a nuisance, we turned off the comment option.
Maybe the only way Microsoft and Google can stop this nonsense, is to change the price for the email service to say $5/year. Maybe even giving the $5 to World Vision or the Cancer Society would make it easy for customers and more expensive than spammers.
Some of the anti-spam challenge-response services I've seen use CHAPTCHA. This is overkill. That's because CHAPTCHA isn't a realistic value add since spammers don't care about reply messages.
