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I get a lot of flack at times because I do some stuff that could be considered "black hat" in the SEO world but one thing I never do and absolutely detest is spamming people.  In fact I absolutely hate spammers with extreme contempt.  You see almost daily I now hear people refer to any commercial email as spam. 

Such as "my cable company spams me" or "I signed up for a newsletter and now they spam me all the time".

In these cases people know that the email isn't really spam but they get so much real spam so often they start to see every email from anyone except a coworker or personal friend as spamming.  This is why I hate spammers, they are ruining legitimate email marketing!

In the past year it has gotten even worse because of image spam.   Odds are you are getting image spam and have been for a while.  Image spam gets around conventional email filters because the spamming scum don't type a text based email, instead they convert the text into an image so the filter does not see any of the text and therefore can't filter based upon it.

To make it worse they then use automated scripts to make thousands of versions of the graphic, one version may have a border, the next will be one pixel wider, the next one pixel higher, etc.  This makes such spam have no "foot print" so it can't even become a known spam in time.

Then spammers take one more step and register new domains almost daily to send image spam from.  By the time a domain name like spammingscumbag@spamdomain.com is known to filters, the domain has been abandoned and the spammer is now at sleezyscum@botheringme.com, etc.

All in all image spam with this pattern has become the worst type of email spam we have ever seen since the dawn of the net.  Now there seems to be a company that has developed a filter specifically to stop image spam.  The company is called, Borderware and they have developed an image spam filter technology.  The process is known as Intercept Image Analysis and according to the company's web site it filters image spam by…

"The Intercept Image Analysis inspects over thirty attributes about each image including positions and relationships to other message characteristics and is designed to adapt and learn about new image spam campaigns and to defeat known and emerging spam threats"

BorderWare has recieved a lot of great industry reviews and awards so hopefully their new product can help with the image spam problem.  If so they are doing a great service both to users and legitimate marketers.

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: image spam, email marketing, spam filter, firewall, security, email filtering, spam blocking

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