Spam is back, and worse than ever

Found on Red Tape Chronicles on Sunday, 21 January 2007
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Not long ago, there seemed hope that spam had passed its prime. Just last December, the Federal Trade Commission published an optimistic state-of-spam report, citing research indicating spam had leveled off or even dropped during the previous year.

Instead, it now appears spammers had simply gone back to the drawing board. There's more spam now than ever before.

There are 62 billion spam messages sent every day, IronPort says, up from 31 billion last year. Now, spam accounts for three of every four e-mails sent, according to another anti-spam firm, MessageLabs.

Image spam is a big part of the resurgence of unwanted e-mail. By using pictures instead of words in their messages, spammers are able to evade filters designed to detect traditional text-based ads.

Spotting spam before you open it is a plus -- sometimes spam messages contain small images that report back to the sender as soon as a message is opened, teaching the spammer that your e-mail address is valid. More spam is sure to follow.

There's always the option to create a "temporary failure" during email transfer (or simply break the transmission) when your mailserver realizes it's receiving an email including an image that is less than 100kB. Spammers have to pump out as much as possible and cannot afford to deal with error messages, unlike valid mailservers. They also can't make the images too big, since this will also slow down their system. Personally, I think about simply rejecting everything with an inline image; attachements don't seem to be interesting for a spammer so far (only for trojan spams, but good virus filters take care of that).