Spam

Category: Newspaper article

Article sent to 'The Ottawa Citizen' on Jan 26, 2007

Every day I delete between 20 and 30 spam e-mails. I get everything from invitations to update my bank account information from a bank that I do no business with, to quick money schemes, to Viagra. Mostly I get the latter. If I ever considered taking even a fraction of the Viagra peddled in spam mail, I’d be writing this article from the moon.

The writing in most spam is gibberish. Spammers often use random bits of prose or graphics to get by spam filters. Since Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have found more ways to identify spam text, using pattern recognition software, most spammers have now turned to full graphics. Clicking on these graphics is a sure recipe for drastically increasing future spam.

The next step is for ISPs to develop character recognition within graphics. As spam has become a very costly and dangerous problem for unwary users, it is high time that ISPs resolve this problem. Optical Character Readers have been around for years. Surely it shouldn’t be a big leap for ISPs to develop spam filters for text hidden in graphics.