What is Digg?54 Comments
- davenaff, on 10/12/2007, -3/+26Very misleading title. It should be changed to read: How to filter messages with images attached.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+19good thing spammers havent learned how to make jpegs...
- ksponge, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15Why the hell would you save it as a gif?
- jgrahamc, on 10/12/2007, -4/+16False positive anyone? This filter is set up to send anything with an attachment that's a GIF image to the trash. So what happens when I forward pictures of my latest conquest to my buddies?
John. - kingkilr, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13If you can't recognize spam e-mail you have one of the following:
A) Weird family and friends
B) Weird subscriptions(think Viagra users weekly)
C) A diluted idea about what constitutes legitimate email
Regardless I recommend you seek medical advice. - Yez70, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11I'd rather see Google use that Image recognition software/company they just acquired to scan images and create a filter for this type of spam.
- simd, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11Very few people send gifs to each other so there should be very few false positives. I can't remember the last time I was sent a legitimate gif. Jpeg maybe, but not gif.
You want to show your conquest in 256 colours? Geez... looks that bad huh?
Great tip for many people while Google work on a better anti-spam solution for these. - Oniony, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8"Why the hell would you save it as a gif?"
For low colour diagrams, line drawings and text, GIF will generally result in a smaller file size, which I guess is why they chose GIF. With a reduced file size they can send the spams quicker. - uptown, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8"Why the hell would you save it as a gif?"
'cause GIFs can be animated! - simd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Glad you've got time to manually sort it. I'd rather a computer did it for me - isn't delivering relavant information the point of the damn thing?
- mikaelc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6You can test the filter in GMail by doing a mail search with the specified parameters.
I got 11 false positives by applying the filter on my old mails (it captured 50 gif-spams).
It seems some of my legitimite mails contained signatures with GIF-logos. - bigcheez, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5then the spam adapts and get all droopy and misplaced. it will be called sloppy spam.
- biohzrd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@bigcheez, so.....you delete all incoming mail from people that are IN your address book? Heartless. ;)
- tch1337, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4This would be great if you could have it not work for people in your contact list.
- rabiddogma, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Yeah this is *****. I tested this on my inbox and most of the messages it got are legit emails. I'm a graphic artist and send images back and forth with people a lot. Also some of my business contacts have .gif in their sig files. This is a really dumb solution. How the ***** did this make it to the front page?
LAME!!! - szembek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3That's crap. Usually when I'm addressing somebody in an email it's by: bro, man, bitch, dude, honey, wife, baby.
Not by the person's actual name. I rarely email people I don't know well. - JimV, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4By the way, Google uses Symantec's Brightmail product.
- quinnk, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3So you don't subscribe to any mailing lists, receive any CCs, etc.?
- szembek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Gmail already blocks almost all spam. Blocking all GIFs is stupid. This article is inaccurate as it does not tell you how to block spam, it tells you how to block all emails with gifs attached.
- chobbney, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3"Why the hell would you save it as a gif?"
I often send GIFs. Text and other minimal-colour images are great as GIFs and crap as JPGs. Such as the business logo I sent to someone for their approval last week. - kingkilr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I use gmail if I see spam I mark it as such and never see it again.
- MasterDwarf, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Gmail has the best spam filter for web-based email accounts, bar none.
- shitthisfook, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3"No, they use image LINKS (as in, to a zombie server) to see if an email account is active. The type of spam we're talking about here has the images encoded in the email itself and therefore the spammer has no way of knowing when the image has been seen or not."
OK, I misunderstood the article. And image LINKS is what I meant in my first post, you're right. - JeremyBanks, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3For anthing that GIF is good for, use PNG instead. Its file sizes are smaller, and it's much more flexable If Internet Explorer screws it up a little, that's too bad.
- MalDON, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Gmail already does this for me. As I look in my spam box, all the spam with images are there.
- rabiddogma, on 10/12/2007, -0/+24 Legit out of 34 are a few false positives? Umm I'm sorry when it comes to legit emails I don't want 4 out of 34 emails to be identified as false positives--that's more than 1 in 10. Maybe your legit emails don't mean that much to you but the legit email I get are very valuable. I can't afford that kind of ratio.
- cdinic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2png is Superior to gif for "low colour diagrams, line drawings and text" Why hasn't this become general knowledge yet?
- ContactRose, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3No, they use image LINKS (as in, to a zombie server) to see if an email account is active. The type of spam we're talking about here has the images encoded in the email itself and therefore the spammer has no way of knowing when the image has been seen or not.
- pkulak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This used to get into my Gmail account, but it seems to all be getting picked up now.
- involution, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Here is a spamassassin module that does just that
http://users.own-hero.net/~decoder/fuzzyocr/
Still in beta, but works quite well. - takeda, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm using bogofilter when that spam first appeated, some of them weren't detected by bogofilter. But as soon as I purged my whole database, created new one based on my (4000 spam and 4000 nonspam current messages collected) and then tuned the filter. It works like a charm.
I highly recommend bogofilter to everyone. On the beginning of using it, doesn't work as well, but once you collect enough mails it's really good (best spam filter I ever used - also so far I didn't had any false positives.) - TheSolomon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1kingkilr- While that works well for a good portion of the spam I receive through my GMail account, marking this type of message as spam seems to have no result--many still come into my Inbox with GMail being none the wiser. The difficulty with thwarting these messages comes from the fact they frequently contain a large amount of coherent text, such as a perfectly readable story about some random event. This, coupled with the attached images, fools GMail into thinking it's a legitimate sender writing you about something, and attaching related images.
- TheSolomon, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I was disappointed to see just how little GMail has in the way of filtering options. With OS X Mail, I have it set to filter out any messages containing an image attachment that is *not* from someone on my previous recipients list and *not* from anyone in my address book. I figure if I haven't written them and otherwise have no idea who they are, I don't probably don't want images from them. It works pretty well.
- takeda, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1use bogofilter. properly trained has 0 false positives (I never got one, and I'm scanning my spam folder regularly just in case)
- daenyth, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Here's a tip to avoiding spam: Don't sign up for crap with your main email address. I've had the same gmail account for over a year now.. possibly almost two, and I never get a single piece of spam. Just make a dummy account that will only be used for signups, and use your main for personal things.
- epheterson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I have a bunch of false positives, be sure to click test filter before you apply it.
- bigcheez, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1thunderbird is great for multi-level filtering for situations like this. it will be nice when gmail filtering is that good.
example: [from - is in my address book - personal address book], [move message to - junk] - portwojc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Wouldn't a better solution be to OCR the image and spam filter what it finds in the image?
If they can be smart enough to OCR a feed back captcha (if it isn't scrambled) we can be smart enough to do that. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I've seen many of these spams using PNG instead of GIF. About 25% of mine.
- MrViklund, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yea, this image spam is very irritating but I can see just from the Head Line if a message is spam and just delete it right away.
- sciencebase, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I've been getting at least a dozen of these gif-attached messages a day for weeks. Attachment filtering in Pegasus Mail is key to not having to "see" them. Like others said, no one sends gifs these days.
- mike503, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0they're called "web bugs" usually.
and by default, at least on my gmail account, remote images are NOT loaded, unless i select the option to show them. i think there is an option to show it just one time, or remember the server as a "safe" server for images as well... i know the latter i definately true. - lane.montgomery, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I just create a filter that looks for emails that don't have my first name in the body.
If somebody is actually writing you an email, they will almost always include your name in the message. If it is spam or (just about as worse) a forward then it is likely your individual name will not be in the body of the message. It even catches those random newsletters from groups you are subscribed to but rarely ever read the emails from.
I created a "Probable Spam" label and filtered it accordingly.
The solution in this story for some reason catches photos I email myself from my phone even though they are in .jpg format. One of the images T-Mobile uses in the email for their logo must be a .gif. In any case it won't work for me so I'll stick with my old method. - mike503, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0[weird: for some reason, digg let me edit the comment, but wouldn't show me the submit option?] - i had to revise this slightly.
they're called "web bugs" usually.
and by default, at least on my gmail account, remote images are NOT loaded, unless i select the option to show them. i think there is an option to show it just one time, or remember the sender as a "safe" sender for images as well... i know the latter is definately true, i have one or two senders that i have flagged as "safe" - aak4, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Get revenge against the spammers: http://www.spamitback.com. The more people who use it, the more effective it is. (It's running on my computer now).
- JimV, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1The most spam I ever get on gmail is 4-5 image spams per week in my inbox. I get about 100+ that get routed to my spam folder each day.
If you know anything about anti-spam products...that's pretty damn good. - bwmartens, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0When I did just the gif filter it filtered out a bunch of important messages (bills from my mortgage company have their logo attached as a gif.) In the "doesn't have" box I put my name. The combination of filtering everything with a gif attachment that doesn't have my name seems to work pretty well. I didn't get any false positives.
I read my GMail through Outlook and I have SpamBayes which does Bayesian filtering. It catches a lot of stuff that GMail misses but hasn't learned how to stop these gif messages yet. - Jammerdelray, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0or send yourself a invite and delete your old gmail account after you've fowarded all your stuff to the new one and leave the spammers baffled.
- hakrzcode, on 10/12/2007, -6/+5Actually. The title is correct. Image spam, is the correct term.
- ludwik, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2With gifs attached. It works more correctly than normal gmail SPAM filter.
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