Image spam woes

rolypolyman — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 12:13:56 -0800

The amount of image spam I'm getting has snowballed in the past few months. What can I do? By image spam, I mean where spammers send their text content as a GIF image and then put a paragraph of unrelated text, like the Gettysburg Address, in plain text, to fool Bayesian filters.

I use PocoMail and K9. K9's Bayesian filtering does not work, no matter how many hundreds of messages I train it on (and I'm having concerns this will start snagging legitimate messages). I posted on the K9 forum and got no real response, so maybe it's time to switch programs.

Ideas for flagging image spam? I don't expect spam filters to OCR an image (though it doesn't seem farfetched to detect the sharp angular patterns of text). However I think spam protection has focused too heavily on Bayesian filtering of text, and is not asking questions like "what is this image doing here?"

And no, I can't go to GMail because the domain name I have to use is that of my small business. Bucketloads of spam get into GMail anyway, from what I've seen.

Filtering Gmail image spam

Saucy Intruder — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 10:16:14 -0800

Argh! Gmail image spam! I'm getting 20 of these a day. Since Google has failed to filter these messages, is there a workaround I can use? Also, would simply deleting these messages rather than marking them as spam reduce the possibility of false positives?

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Image spam woes

Filtering Gmail image spam