Image spam driving everyone crazy

Submitted by acohill on Tue, 11/14/2006 - 10:06

NetworkWorld reports that spam traffic has jumped substantially in the past month or two. Fueling the deluge of junk mail are two changes in the spam ecosphere. Spammers are using two new zombie programs that infect Windows computers, making ordinary desktop computers into spam machines that can send out hundreds of thousands of spam emails per day. Often, people don't even know their machine has been infected; the only hint that something may be wrong is sluggish performance.

The second thing driving the new levels of spam is "image spam," which replaces text with GIF and JPEG images. Very few junk mail filters are able to detect that an email with just an image in it is spam, so spammers are both sending out more of that kind of spam, but we are seeing more of it in our IN boxes because our email filters and firewalls can't detect it. There is some work being done to use image processing software to identify and detect image spam, but it will take some time to get the software working well enough to deploy.

Ultimately, I see no solution other than to charge a fee for email. The problem with spam is that there is virtually no cost to send it. In essence, the cost of delivery is paid by the receiver, rather than the sender. If we had a micropayment system in place where it cost, for example, 1/100th of a cent to send a piece of email, it would cost most people and businesses almost nothing, but spammers sending millions of emails per day could no longer afford to do it.