Ars Technica is reporting that spambots have cracked Hotmail and Gmail CAPTCHA, allowing spammers to open thousands of email accounts and flood our inboxes with even more SPAM. It takes less than 1 minute for the spambot to crack Hotmail’s CAPTCHA .

Spammers are using these new email accounts to spam advertisements for “lottery tickets and watches.” Apparently the current economy’s state has not had any effect on the demand for lottery tickets and watches. Go figure.

More importantly, this questions the effectiveness of CAPTCHA to stop spammers and bots. While creating more advanced CAPTCHAs might thwart spambots in the short term, eventually they will find a way to crack them. In addition, if these CAPTCHAs get any more complicated, users will complain. Typing in a string of random letters and numbers all mixed up can be annoying as is, I can only imagine what a harder to crack version would be. So what can Hotmail and Gmail do?

Create a Better CAPTCHA
If you think about the evolution of media on the internet, video CAPTCHAs are the next logical step. I can see it now, YouTube CAPTCHA. Watch this short clip and answer a question. Using YouTube’s huge library of video with user supplied tags and descriptions, there is enough data to create thousands of computer generated clips and answer keys. Can users suffer through a 5 second video and answer a question? What about visually impaired users?

Limit the Number of Accounts per IP
If these spambots are running on unsuspecting users’ machines, limit the number of email accounts that can be created for each IP. Only a bot would create 1400 email addresses a day and log into each account and send out email. How long until they figure out a way around this one?

Make Users Confirm Their Account
Use phone call back to confirm the account. Sure its annoying, but would you trade that one simple step for a world with a lot less SPAM?

In reviewing the success of your email marketing campaigns, there are several data points that provide valuable insight. These are the things that you should be tracking. They include:

• Delivery rate – percentage of individuals that receive the message (delivered divided by sent)
• Open rate – percentage of individuals that open the message (unique opens divided by delivered)
• Open to click rate – percentage of individuals who opened the message that clicked on a link (unique clicks divided by unique opens)
• Conversion rate – percentage of people who clicked on a link that converted on the landing page

While most email marketing suites provide some of these numbers as part of their reporting, it is important to note that our definition and value of what we track is slightly different. For example, typical click through rates are measured as the percentage of clicks to the number of messages sent. But if a recipient does not open the message, how can they produce a click? This typical measurement of the “click through rate” doesn’t tell us much.  By measuring the percent of clicks to opens (click to open rate), we are able to determine how effective the message is at producing action (clicks).

The goal is to evaluate the success of the campaign along each step of the following process:

Send -> Deliver -> Open -> Click -> Convert

Setting benchmarks and measuring the success of each step allows us to determine where the areas for improvement are in the email marketing process.

Here are some things to look at for poor performance at each step of the email marketing process:

• Low deliver rate - how clean/up to date is the list? how are messages being sent out? is there a server issue? are you on block lists?
  
• Low open rate - are your subject lines compelling? is your from name/email recognizable? are messages being caught in SPAM or bulk folders?
• Low open to click rate - is your message compelling? is the creative and copy engaging and focused on actionable items? are images being blocked? are the messages targeted to specific market segments?
• Low conversion rate - how compelling is your landing page? do you even have a landing page?

Constant fine tuning at each step of the process can help to improve the overall results of your email marketing campaign.