Image spam

[Chris Yuzik]

Renee Gehlbach wrote:
> I see plenty of ham w/ attached gifs through one of my servers, but 
> very little from others.  Yet another example there being no one 
> standard pattern for ham.
>
> Hmm....  why exactly would this be preferable?  We tend to set email 
> clients not to permit the display non-attached images in html 
> messages.  Thunderbird and Squirrelmail, I believe, even do this by 
> default.  I've heard plenty of arguments against allowing email 
> clients to go retrieve pictures, do you have arguments for it?
>
> Do you use Fuzzy OCR?  It's the only way I've found to really target 
> image spam.
Renee,

We are experimenting with Fuzzy OCR, and while in our tests it does 
catch some image spam, it's not doing very well with image spam where 
the image has background noise, slanted text, etc.

I agree that having a link to an external image is not (necessarily) a 
good idea, and in fact can activate web-bugs and such on spam that does 
manage to get through.

I find it interesting that Barracuda is advertising that they block "all 
image spam". Abaca is advertising they block 99% of all image spam. How 
are these guys achieving this success rate?

Chris