How do you fight image-spam?

Posted by Anonymous on Sat 14 Oct 2006 at 19:25

Over the past few months there has been a dramatic rise in a new type of spam mailings, which comprise of semi-random words and a real message embedded inside an image. How do you deal with this?

There is the gocr package available upon Debian Sarge, and other releases, which attempts to perform OCR, but this process is very fragile.

Although fragile and fairly resource-intensive OCR has made available as a plugin to complex anti-spam solutions such as SpamAssassin. The Fuzzy OCR plugin appears to be the dominant solution right now.

But for those of us not using SpamAssassin which solutions exist, and work?

How do you fight this problem?

Short of using image dimensions, or filtering all mail with an attachment is there a simple solution?

This article can be found online at the Debian Administration website at the following bookmarkable URL (along with associated comments):

http://www.debian-administration.org/article/How_do_you_fight_image-spam