Re: my solution to image spam (previously mentioendconsistant failures)

On 11/14, John Hinton wrote:
> What happens to email created in html format with images included in 
> that html. I get a lot of email which falls under that category? In fact 

That is precisely what this filter blocks.  

> a lot of end users find it cutesy to use such, or even one of the built 
> in email templates from Outlook.

Then those users will get an email back from their mail server saying 
"Error: Message content rejected as image spam" and they can try again
without the "cutesy" bits.  I am interested in suggestions for error
messages that these sort of users might better understand.  

> I personally think this solution is a bit too simplistic, not taking 
> into account the exceptions. Although it would be wonderful it was just 
> that easy.

I think I made it pretty clear that I gave significant consideration to the
exceptions, ensuring that any email from legit senders who thought being
"cutesy" was a good idea would get a notification that they were
unsuccessful (without sending hundreds of bounce messages to forged sender
addresses).


On 11/14, David A. Lee wrote:
> Case in point ... my wife is an addict to "Incredimail" which does exactly 
> this.

"some mail clients encourage the most awful, brain-dead behavior from
users. incredimail is one of them.  it is an abomination. while i have
pity for outlook users, i have only contempt for incredimail users -
they deliberate choose to use that crap, it's not forced on them by
higher-powers at work."

- Craig Sanders, author of the regex I'm using, from the thread which I
  linked to.

>From 6/26/06 11/14/06 I have received four non-spams with inlined attached
images.  Two were very spammy responses to my resume, one was an ad for a
DVD (which I signed up for), and one was an email from my baby sister with
a picture of her cellphone which she downloaded off the web and I yelled at
her for not just sending me the link to the original.  I would have been
extremely happy, in all cases, for these emails to never have landed in
my inbox and instead for the sender to have received a notification that
the form of their email was unacceptable to me.


Again, I consider images spams to be a real problem.  Yes, they can
currently be filtered by various other means.  But I believe those means
will be easy to cripple with small effort by the spammers.  And I feel it
is far less necessary to allow distribution of inlined attached images than
to defeat these spams.  Attached images still work.  Inlined non-attached
images still work.  Both of those can successfully be filtered by
spamprobe.

-- 
"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your front door. You step
into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing
where you might be swept off to." - Gandalf
http://www.ChaosReigns.com

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