Daily Archives: 2006-11-20

A backwards way of dealing with image spam

There is a great deal more email spam in your inboxes this Autumn (as noted, for example, here, here and here!). That’s partly because a very great deal more spam is being generated — perhaps twice as much as just a few months ago.

A lot of this junk is “image spam”, where the advertisement is contained within an embedded picture (almost invariably a GIF file). The filtering systems that almost everyone now uses are having significant problems in dealing with these images and so a higher percentage of the spam that arrives at the filters is getting through to your inbox.

So higher volumes and weaker filtering are combining to cause a significant problem for us all 🙁

But I have an interesting suggestion for filtering the images: it might be a lot simpler to go about it backwards 🙂

So read on!

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