Spam in images

[Bill Wohler]

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

> On Sat, 2006-08-05 at 18:45 -0700, Bill Wohler wrote:
>> 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?
>
> No, character recognition in graphics would take forever to do well.
> Are you telling me that there's nothing to click on in the email?

That's correct.

> The image itself isn't a clickable link?  

Nope.

> I find that hard to believe. It
> can't be a very effective spam then.

Actually, it's been extremely effective at getting through the
filters.

David Relson <relson at osagesoftware.com> wrote: 

> I've been seeing 2 distinct varieties of image spam recently.  
> 
> #1 contains image001.gif, a slew on innocuous words, and is 28Kb
> to 29Kb long.  

This is the one I'm referring to (mine are about 32 kB). In addition,
the mailer is consistently "Microsoft Office Outlook, Build
11.0.5510". I wonder if this is the spammer's mailer, or whether this
is an infected mailer.

> FWIW, bogofilter has had no trouble with #2 and #3 and training is
> helping with #1.

Glad to hear it. I'm still getting a dozen unsures every day. I'm
guessing it takes a few hundred to train properly. Oh wait! Looking at
my spam folder, it does appear that a lot of these messages are
getting tagged as spam after all. But there are so many of them!

Thanks for the feedback. Will keep training...

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