Michael Gracie

Spam levels have risen from 31 billion messages per day in 2005 to 61 billion in 2006, according to Ironport. It is shifting form too, with more than 25% now being represented by image spam (up from less than 5% a year earlier).

Image attachments will quickly become fodder for spam filters, if Newton’s Third Law holds true. This means your silly little image based signatures (the ones with your logo and big title on them, that you send to your mother-in-law) will be allowed no more, and you won’t be able to share porn either.

Is any of this a bad thing (besides the spam levels, that is)?

It’s being called a “new kind of spam”, but it is nothing new.

Like the old adage “If a tree falls in the forest, but nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” - if spam isn’t caught because you don’t know how to detect it, it doesn’t mean that when you do learn how it becomes some “new kind of spam.”

The headline should have read “Anti-spam vendors figure out how to detect image spam - find it is a huge problem they never thought about before.”

***UPDATE***

Maybe Microsoft was keeping wraps on the image issue so they could look good - they had Outlook blocking them by default almost three years ago.