Way back in August, Pete wrote: > i'm getting hammered with email containing text designed to trick bayesian > filters. <snip> > the gif image itself is mostly white with a few colored "threads" here and > there.
I finally took a closer look at one of these. (Using Mutt, I never notice the GIF attachments, and don't ever view them.) If you look at the GIF in a browser or GUI email client, you'll actually see some message. That is, text that's been written into the image. (Not unlike a fax, or a scan of a page from a book.) The one I looked at was some stupid "look out for this cool stock" crap. What they're doing is sending an animated GIF. The first (few) frame(s) of the GIF are mostly-white, with some gibberish (probably to get around some anti-spam tools?) The final frame -- and, obviously, the GIF does not loop -- is the actual spam message. So yeah, the text is gibberish, and if you look at the GIF in a more basic viewer app. (one that doesn't handle animated GIFs, and only shows you the first frame, and not the final frame -- XV for example), you'll just see mostly-white, and scratch your head: "what the hell was the point of sending me that?" :) -- -bill! [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/ _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
