If you have a hotmail account, you are probably aware of the increasing amount of spam you have to delete everyday to keep your current inbox from reaching the current storage limit. For some people, including myself, every half an hour represents additional spam on a typical day. What is going on? Aren’t the spam filters supposed to be working?

It seems the spammers are trying new ways to get their emails into your inbox [don't they always?]. One of the new methods is to send you an email with images; the images have the messages shown. Since the spam filters cannot yet read the text off an image, there is not any easy way to see what the content of the message is, other than the subject line. Since the subject line of spam mail/email is almost always innocent looking, an email will probably pass through current day spam filters. Something more interesting is the fact that spammers are adding completely off-topic [to their original message] text in the emails to make it look like a normal email. Since some spam filters block emails from new addresses or suspected addresses which may send attachment, sending a few lines of completely random lingo seems to be the growing trend among other trends in spammers new techniques to bypass filters. Consider the email below that I got at hotmail.

<%popup(20041013-spam-articles-words-to-spoof-fool.JPG|858|502|Spammers using random text/lingo to fool filters)%> – Dimensions – 858×502 ; Size – 41.4 kb ; File Type – JPG Image.

As seen in the above image, random text is included near the bottom of the email to add more queries for the filters probably. This is the only text in the email; everything else is divided into two images, as the attachment list in the image shows. This in turn may result in the email passing through as a normal email, since none of the random words match the current black listed words found in most spam mail/emails.