Subscribe by EmailThe Scourge of Image Spam
May 17, 2007 by Geeks are Sexy | 3 comments
CSOonline has a great piece today explaining everything there is to know about the relatively new phenomenon that is image spam. Definitely worth the read if you are wondering why so many spam emails end up in your inbox instead of your junk mail folder.
Image Spam—an e-mail solicitation that uses graphical images of text to avoid filters—is not new. Recently, though, it reached an unprecedented level of sophistication and took off. A year ago, fewer than five out of 100 e-mails were image spam, according to Doug Bowers of Symantec. Today, up to 40 percent are. Meanwhile, image spam is the reason spam traffic overall doubled in 2006, according to antispam company Borderware. It is expected to keep rising.
Part 1: The Scourge of Image Spam
Part 2: Image Spam: By the Numbers
- Only one in 40 e-mails is NOT spam
- Spam is now 83% of all e-mail
- MP3 Spam starts appearing in inboxes
- Spam wastes the power of 2.4 million homes
I think spam that has images like this actually makes it easier to filter. Since these spammers almost invariably use a GIF format, I just set up a filter to junk all messages with GIF attachments, and now I hardly ever see them anymore. If friends or family ever email me photos or such, they’ll be in JPEG format, so I won’t miss out on those.
DOH! that’s an easy solution :)
I wonder if there’s a way to do this at the server level.. that’s what I would need to do here :) I’ll look for a solution and post it later.
Cool…
If you find that solution please post it. I’ll sure make a good use of it.