Last Updated on: 21st April 2015, 04:00 pm
I discovered something yesterday that has made me decide that I hate Hotmail. It’s a good thing I don’t use their web interface unless I’m really stuck.
I got a frantic call from a friend who isn’t the most computer literate sort in the world. “All I want to do is send a message from my email,” she moaned, “And I can’t!” She eventually told me that Hotmail is now asking her randomly to solve a CAPTCHA, even after she’s logged in! She had finished writing a message, and hit send and she got presented with a message to the effect of “to help stop spam, we sometimes ask you to type the characters you see.” This was a link. So not only did she have to fill in this blasted CAPTCHA, after already logging into her account, but she had to leave the message she was writing to go play their stupid game.
Then, after she solved the stupid CAPTCHA, it took her back to her message, but didn’t send it automatically! She actually had to hit send. If you’re going to make someone jump through hoops, at least make it easy at the end. They already hit send. That’s what presented them with this stupid “puzzle” as they put it. Now just send the mail, goddamn it!
It’s worth noting that while she was logged in, I was able to log in so I could see what was going on. So two people can log in to the same account simultaneously and that’s no problem, but we have to solve CAPTCHAs so we don’t send spam? Who is this really protecting?
Hotmail, I hate you. And to any blind folks who use Hotmail’s web interface, if you have Firefox and WebVisum, always log into your hotmail using Firefox, because you never know when they’re going to spring a stupid captcha on you. Just, blarf. Yes, there’s an audio version, but I don’t know how many of them actually work anymore.
Stupid Captchas, you suck.
