Hey Google - Prep the OCR, this SPAM is getting a little out of control That's right, despite GMail's phenomenal spam filter the spammers have found a new way to circumvent our filters and get in our faces. The tactic is simple, lots of seemingly normal text with some picture attachments.

The fact of the matter however, is that these messages are working within the rules of the spam filter to make it into your inbox, and should you end-up opening the message and 'display the images' you will find yourself staring at some advertisement for viagra, cialias or some other unsolicited message.

Thus, I see one quick (though perhaps not quite so easy) solution - enable OCR capabilities on the images coming into one's mailbox.... the ratio of text to image is significantly higher than most, if not all other, images being received - so simply seeing that there is a considerable amount of text in the images should provide an important first clue.

After this step, should the image not have passed the initial test, then do a full OCR scan to see exactly what words are contained within the images - this should also help a lot.

That being said, I do continue to give kudos to the G-Men (and G-Women) for keeping my spam down to a minimum.  ¶ 7/31/2006 07:47:00 AM