I came across mail.yeah.net, from a Chinese Internet provider, and thought I’d try out their free email service, and see how that would work out.

The sign up form was full of Chinese characters, naturally, still I could type in my name, fill in the password, date of birth etc. But after about 10 fields or so, I got to this section:

Screenshot from the yeah.net sign up form

Now I was kind of stuck. I went to Google / Translate and and pasted in the label, and clicked the “Translate” button:

Screen shot from Google Translate

Please type in the characters above! — a CAPTCHA field — of course! Now I was definitely stuck, and gave up! (I don’t know Chinese characters, nor do I know how to produce them with my keyboard)

I’ve been putting CAPTCHAs on some websites myself, to keep out spam and abuse; see

• The loggingit sign up form
• The stephansmap sign up form
• The Traffic Life guestbook form

My friends tell me often that they don’t like it when they have to tackle those CAPTCHAs (this is why I thought of the CAPTCHA for the stephansmap sign up form: it is supposed to entertain, as far as my entertainment talents go in terms of computer graphics.) But it definitely stops the spammers.

So with yeah.net I got to see this all from a different perspective.