Evil Speckly Emails

It's interesting that this latest flare-up in the spam war is costing both spammers and anti-spammers dearly. It's probably less of an issue for spammers because their costs are largely fixed and they offload much of the bandwidth and processing costs on to unsuspecting infected bot users. But anti-spammers are incurring much greater costs in processing and bandwidth.

eWeek.com has an article explaining why my inbox is filled with crap these days. Boiling it down, they talk about things like layered GIFs and animated GIFs and those speckly things on Viagra ads that accumulate overnight. My hosting provider does a great job of blocking stuff for me, but I can definitely see how things are getting worse lately. I saw something on Reddit a few days ago about setting a filter to nix anything with a .gif extension outright... since I'm doing less web work lately, that might be a viable solution... but I still hope someone comes up with a way to block this new generation of crap more effectively.

That, or hunt down and eradicate spammers everywhere. I'm flexible that way.