Image Spam

Over the last few weeks - it seems like all the major publications have put out stories on the increasing levels of image spam. One source is reporting it now makes up about half of all spam email, and that the total image spam being sent has a little under tripled in the last 12 months.

The same source points out that the number of messages containing URLs has dropped significantly. This is probably because a large portion of image spam is promoting "pump and dump" stock scams. Usually spam is used to promote a website - and its success can be measured in number of hits generated. With stock spam - the goal is to trick someone into purchasing a stock - so no website is required.

Over the last six months SpamButcher has undergone a lot of tuning to better catch image spam. Our spam email blocker software is now very effective at dealing with these kinds of messages.

The short of it is that any email containing an image is immediately suspected of being spam. A few other factors come in to play before making the final filtering decision - but the presence of an image is the big one.

The flip side to this is that it does pose a little extra risk to legitimate emails. I suspect this is even more often the case as email server administrators decide they've simply "had enough" and set up their email filtering software to block all image-containing messages at the server.

So, don't send images in email. They're going to get blocked. Instead, publish the picture online and send a link to it. If you have to send an image via email - send another text-only message to the person giving them a heads up. They may need to dig your original message out of their junk email folder.

The more users understand that messages full of images aren't going to get delivered reliably, the more leeway system administrators have when configuring servers to block image spam.

Back