[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote on Sunday, October 29, 2006 3:25 PM -0500: > Colin> I've tried this in Firefox with the filter "image/gif". > So far, Colin> it seems to work. > > The canonical example of where this won't work is a parent sending > baby pix to Grandma and Grandpa. As an individual you might decide > that throwing out all mail containing images (or at least GIF > images) is worth the risk of lost mail, but it's far from a general > solution to image-based spam.
That depends on how it is implemented. For example, Outlook 2003 is supposed to render images in messages from correspondents listed in your address book. That takes care of the objection you list above, most of the time. If GIF's being part of a rendered message become a significant spam indicator, it is likely that legitimate corporate senders will avoid it. That will leave a few exuberant parents, and a whole lot of spammers, creating that style of message. Given that scenario, whitelisting is a reasonable solution. MUA's could eventually help the situation if they discouraged putting inline images in a message. I guess that bottom line is that I don't see any problem for the average business email user. Business newsletter senders will adapt as necessary - they always do. Individual home users will do whatever their ISP's force on them. I doubt that ISP's will care to engage in an arms race that forces them to do OCR on every piece of spam they receive. SpamAssassin during SMTP is one thing, OCR raises the ante and threatens the affordability of ordinary email. Spam becomes a credible DDoS. -- Seth Goodman _______________________________________________ [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/spambayes Check the FAQ before asking: http://spambayes.sf.net/faq.html
