Spam mails - the evolution!

The initial spam was mainly that kind offering large sums of money with an elaborate story backing it or those advertisements offering certain kinds of help and services. The spam filters learnt enough to detect such mails and filter them

Then recently, we did see lots of mail whose text was basically an extract from well known literature and so on. Obviously, the aim of these kinds of mails was to confuse the spam filters and muddle their detection system as readers may tag such mails as spam though they dont contain any of the regular features of spam.

And now for the latest innovation- today my gmail account was given a demonstration of this wonderful new genre of spam mails. The mail had two parts. The first part was an image which advertised various 'services' that many spams mails offer. This being an image cannot be read by the spam filter. And it is embedded in the mail such that it is first thing visible to the reader. It is followed by a text which is almost similar to the kind of text that can be found in any personal mail. An extract of that text: " Spent most of the day cleaning - finally finished the ceiling, got the oak table in, we cleaned the garage, weeded the front, straightened up out back, took.".

Thus it cannot be detected by the spam filter, serves its purpose of advertising through the image and also muddles the spam filter's learned knowledge when tagged as spam. However, its only failing is that it is not effective in non-gui mail clients like pine or mutt where the image would come as an attachment.

Continuation of the previous post would be posted shortly .. Please bear with the delay. The author came across this interesting innovation and wanted to blog about it right away. :P