I have lately started to get this new type of spam mails that slink through the anti-spam filter as easily as if it didn’t exist.
Have to admit that when I opened the mail I was surprised by how they made it happened, with great pain I have to say that I’m impressed by how they did it.
So the email looks something like this;
From: Hermenegildo Hanna
Topic: efrt
Seeing that I didn’t get suspicious at all, I mean how many times haven’t you just typed gibberish in the topic field when sending an email to your buddy?
I have many times, when I need to send something quickly I rarely spend time on filling the fields out so they are understandable.
Now to the content of the mail, that turns out to be nothing else than spam!
Inside I found an image instead of the regular text, and the image was holding the spam info instead, and the only regular text was some gibberish at the bottom, again something in the line of; asjdasd.
Beneath you can see how the image looked like:
Now this has only happened to me on my google-mail account, on my private and other online mailboxes haven’t yet experienced this type of spam.
For now turning on html support will spare you the display of the image but it will still sneak through the anti-spam filter.
Personally I believe it will be hard to stop these types of mails as it will be pretty much impossible, time wise, to parse and try to determine whether the image contains spam or not, but then again Google do amazing things so I wouldn’t get surprised if they introduced this system in the future.
Another way would be to block all incoming mails with html/images and have a white list on senders that are allowed to get straight into your inbox and the other ones not yet there would end up in the spam basket, if needed they could be added to the white list by an easy click.
Now let’s wait and see, as the anti-spam movement and the tools get better, the ideas of new spamming techniques will get more complex and harder to stop.
A mutual evolution that I’m afraid will get very annoying in the future!
