Expert: Carolyn Meinel - 1/15/2007

Question
I've tried to eliminate spam with my filter & most of it is deleted, but one gets thu & I'vew tried to note wording in body or heading to get it, but still it gets thru. Any ideas. Thanks in advance for your help

Answer
I'm sorry to tell you this, but just recently the spammers have gotten a whole lot more sneaky. The most common way nowadays to evade spam filters is to embed a picture in your message with the spam message. Right now no email filter I know of does image recognition of words in an embedded picture. Worse yet, these emails often contain a reasonable sounding message such as a paragraph from a novel or a news story. It hides from your view by being white text on a white background, but spam filters read it just as if it was a legitimate message that includes a nice (ha, hah!) embedded picture.

One solution to this problem is to find an email service whose owners actively search out sources of spam and block it all before it reaches your computer. You will need to check with ones available in your area to see if they offer this service.

The other alternative is to get a new email address and then protect it from getting onto spam lists. You can learn ways to do this at http://spam.abuse.net/userhelp/ . You will should not set up an autoreply on your old address or it will send your new address to the spammers! Also you could temporarily forward your old email to your new address until you have given your new address to all the people from whom you want to get email.