A New Battle in the War on Spam
I’ve been seeing a lot more spam sneaking through my email filters lately. And based on Tyler’s recent piece (I’m having the same experience) and Peter’s post today, I’m not alone. What gives? I want more Spamhaus, not less.
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I’m confident that SPAM software will catch up, but it will become more and more important to combat spam at the service provider level.
Tyler’s piece is accurate in that more spam is being delivered through digital images. Without getting into too much detail (maybe I’ll post my own entry soon), service providers are beginning to implement OCR technology to “read” the images and convert the image into written text that can then be spam filtered.
While this sounds CPU intensive, the systems are pretty efficient: Since the spammers use the same image, sent to millions of different users, after the image is OCR’ed, a unique hash is generated and stored to immediately identify other matching images, without the cpu intensive OCR method.
This is why it’s important to filter SPAM at the service provider level – stop it at the source.