Specifications

Image Spam and What
To Do About It
Pay close attention. This affects everyone who uses
email. If you look closely at my recent spam email
pictured above you will see that it is actually a text-
less email message with a small attached image.
I’ve been getting a lot of these lately and you will
too. If I click on the Save button the message will
appear as a 8.0 Kb GIF fi le on my Desktop. The
advertisement for Pfi zer drugs is not in plain text
so it will not trigger the usual spam fi lters that send
messages with words like “viagra” or “drugs” or
“cialis” right into the Junk or Trash Folder. This
new type of spam is called Image Spam and it is
designed specifi cally to bypass your text fi lters.
Your Mac OS Mail account has a special way you
can catch these image spams and send them on
their way to oblivion. If you closely examine all of
the image spams you receive you will notice that
the image spam emails always have several distin-
guishing marks: they come from a different address
each time and the Content-Type header begins with
either “multipart/related” or with “multipart/alter-
native”. You can use this information by going to
your Mail Preferences (available from the Mail
menu at the top of your screen whenever Mail is
the active application) and selecting the Rules tab.
From the Rules tab you will be able to add a new
rule to the way your Mail program processes new
email messages. When you click on the Add Rule
button a window will appear that offers you an ex-
tremely complete list of conditions that you can
combine any way you want to take control of your
emails. Thats what its for.
So a rule that matches both those conditions like
the one below will snag them before they hit your
inbox