Spam in images

[Bill Wohler]

Tom Anderson <tanderso at oac-design.com> writes:

> Tony L. Svanstrom wrote:
>> On Mon, 31 Jul 2006 the voices made Bill Wohler write:
>> BW> What's the current best practice with these? Classify as spam, or just
>> BW> delete?
>> 
>>  If it's spam, then it's spam... My view is that if you've got a "learning"
>> filter then just hand it all spam and ham, and let it sort it out; if it can't,
>> then it's either broken by design or outdated.
>
> I tend to agree with that view.  However, while I don't think that 
> Bogofilter is "broken" or "outdated", I do like to give it a little more 
> info in cases like this where it's just a big image and relatively 
> neutral headers and perhaps a paragraph of random text.  Except perhaps 
> for the religious or political variety, there's one feature that all 
> spams share... a profit motive.  That means enticing you or tricking you 
> into clicking on a link.  And that's a very, very powerful giveaway. 
> Bogofilter already matches domain names as a part of filtering, but 
> spammers notoriously move around from server to server, thus defeating 
> your built-in greylist created in the course of training on errors. 
> However, through the power of sheer numbers, URIBLs are able to list 
> many of these URLs thanks to their addition via reports from early 
> victims or honeypots.  In order to provide Bogofilter with this extra 
> level of research on each email, I built a pre-filter called 
> "stripsearch" which parses the email body and looks up all URLs

These spams don't have a single URL in them, so I suppose stripsearch
wouldn't help.

Or can stripsearch read the URLs in the GIF?

-- 
Bill Wohler <wohler at newt.com>  http://www.newt.com/wohler/  GnuPG ID:610BD9AD