[Techtalk] spam filters

[Akkana Peck]

Terri Oda writes:
> This reminds me, I'd been meaning to find out if anyone had written 
> some OCR (optical character recognition) to plug into spam assassin for 
> these stupid image-spams.  I guess since updating spam assassin hasn't 
> helped with the problem, the answer is probably no.

I haven't seen one. It sounds like a CPU load on the server, though.

For a while, a lot of those spams called their messages "img001.gif",
so I got the bright idea of blocking any message with an attachment
of that name. I mean, what real person would attach an image with
a name like that?

That didn't last long. Turns out tons of people do that, for images
that contain things like a blue-sky background image for their html
mail (I'm so glad I use mutt and read messages in plaintext), or
their company logo. You'd think they'd name the image sky.gif or
logo.gif or something, but noooo. When I started seeing mail from
Google recruiters including images by that name (for the company
logo) I decided filtering it was probably a bad idea.

-- 
    ...Akkana
    "Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional": http://gimpbook.com