Anthony> Image spam could be more of a problem, except that the less
Anthony> text in the message, the more header clues come into play, as
Anthony> well. While SB doesn't do a massive amount of, for instance,
Anthony> RBL checking, defense in depth (spamassassin+graylisting on the
Anthony> server, SB on the client) seems pretty effective.
Have the spammers still not figured out how to defeat greylisting? (I
suppose they may just not have the time to wait for the timeout on a
compromised machine.) I've run postgrey for a couple years. Maybe that's
one reason I don't see as much junk.
Oh, another thing. I read my mail through XEmacs+VM and very rarely get
legitimate email containing GIFs. When I do, legitimate or not, it's clear
that the message has an image attached. I noticed with email clients like
Thunderbird, that's not always the case. The GIF images might look like
plain (though often colored, blinking) text when rendered. This became
obvious to me when a guy at work showed me such a spam. He couldn't figure
out why the spam filter at work hadn't caught it because it obviously had
lots of spammy text. I explained that was actually a GIF image being
displayed. He has a PhD in Computer Science and is an extremely bright guy,
so I'm sure on casual glance lots of people focus on the random text and
don't realize the sales pitch is embedded in an image, and conclude it must
be the gibberish that's defeating the spam filter. It's just that the spam
filter can't see what you see.
Skip
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