If you have tested the latest addition to the labs (see: New lab added: Live Mail), you would have noticed that there is a captcha (human verification) used to protect against bots creating e-mail addresses for worldwide domination. I could have created my own captcha in PHP, but I decided to use reCAPTCHA.

What’s so special about reCAPTCHA? Well in addition to protecting your registration, comments page, e-mail address, or wiki, it also helps the Internet Archive with it’s project of scanning old books for reading and archiving. Every time you use reCAPTCHA for verification, you’re helping to correct a word that was scanned into a computer but could not be read correctly by that system’s OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software.

If you’re interested in helping out a great site like the Internet Archive, I’d suggest checking this out. reCAPTCHA is compatible with various development languages and web applications such as WordPress.

Today, after much work to convert my code that relied on Neowin’s backbone to help control the system, I have added my system which ties into Windows Live Custom Domains (see: Windows Live Custom Domains Is Cool) and allows you to create a custom e-mail account that is powered by Windows Live Mail.

This registration application gives you the chance to see how you can integrate Windows Live Mail into your site by giving your visitors an e-mail address that has some relation to your domain. At Neowin we provide a variety of domain name choices for members and some exclusive ones for subscribers. All of our e-mail domains have the Neowin name in them and provide recognition of our site to the users who exchange messages with these e-mail address.

If you don’t want to invest resources into running a full e-mail server but want to offer extra site service, Custom Domains is the way to go.

Feel free to give the Live Mail registration a try at the labs site: Live Mail @ blackice912 labs