Herb,
OCR is probably the only sure-fire way to nail this scourge.  As far as being resource intensive, like most other people with always-on broadband access now, my e-mail just trickles in a little at a time.  And many/most PCs are powerful enough to stream video now-a-days; they really shouldn't have a problem with it being added as a feature.  It's a lot more disruptive to manage these by hand, if you ask me.  And an OCR feature could allow itself to be disabled, if it ended up being a performance problem for someone.
 
It's gotta be done.  Now that these spammers have found an easy way to trick these engines to be digging through meaningless text, there'll be no slowing them without OCR.  I'm getting more and more of this style of Spam.  Easy to install/use programs like SpamBayes have to keep up with the times, or they'll die on the vine.  Years ago, when we mostly exchanged text-based e-mail, it wasn't an issue.  But now, nearly all of the e-mail I receive is HTML; and lots of it has images.
 
I'm ONLY using SpamBayes with Outlook 2003 (at home, where I'm having all the trouble).  I love the easy button-based re-training!  And I don't really care for the idea of having to add, train, and administer another layer.
 
Other than a miraculous OCR feature showing up in SpamBayes soon, I'm out of ideas for a simple way of managing this type of mail on my home PC.  (Very frustrating).
 
Thanks,
FMJ


From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Herb Martin
Sent: Sunday, October 02, 2005 12:43 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Spambayes] SpamBayes to Handle Embedded Images

Back in April, Tony Meyer posted that he was receiving a lot of image-based spam.
 
I too am having nothing but trouble with embedded images:
- Daily adds for fake Rolex watches
- Daily stock tips
- TONS of drugs for sale.
 
This style of Spam contains an image at the top, followed by a bunch of totally unrelated text that has been copied from some kind of random composition.  I have very large Spam & Ham folders, that I've successfully trained SpamBayes with.  It's only these image-based adverts that sneak by EVERY DAY. 

Mostly my SpamBayes catches ALL of these when anything gets this far...
 
 Something really needs to be done about this type of Spam within SpamBayes.  Are any other Spam engines able to handle this stuff, by scanning the image for text, or something?

Sure, there are others (as well a SpamBayes if you just keep training EVERY ONE of them) but most of the others are either commercial (i.e., cost money) OR they run on the Server (SpamAssassin, greylistd, and other filters.)

There has been talk about filters which would explicitly do OCR or some other type of image content detection but I don't (personally) know of any that are working/available/effective right now.

Such would also likely be "resource (CPU) intensive".

FWIW, greylisting on the server knocks down practically all of this junk and SpamAssassin catches the rest.

The VERY occasional item that slips through our server is caught by SpamBayes.  (Defense in depth is our key to ZERO spam -- with practically everything REJECTED, not bounced, at the server during SMTP connect time.)
 
And some of us DO WISH to get graphical email -- picture of my grand kid(s) frequently arrive this way.

--
Herb Martin

 



From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Sunday, October 02, 2005 1:53 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Spambayes] SpamBayes to Handle Embedded Images

 
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