Don’t you hate spam...? Spammers get smarter every time and try new ways to get your attention and to avoid spam-filters. The latest trend is to put the spam in a graphical attachment whereas the body of the e-mail is text copied from books. The latter of course will be perfectly legitimate for spam-filters. A real example you can see right here below.

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Several varieties occur where the graphics are at the top, bottom or in the middle of the non-spam text. It even happens that the non-spam text isn’t there (just the graphic spam) or that the text is invisible as the text color is set to be white, the most-used background color in email clients.

It will be difficult to capture all these different forms of spam as lots of people send each other emails with just a graphic attachment.

A lot of spam that is seen lately is what we call “pump and dump" spam, like the one above. These spam mails come both in text-only as graphic spam. On e.g. a Friday afternoon, the spammers will send out a ‘stock market alert’, giving you a strong-buy sign to get shares of a specific - never heard off before - company. The spammers claim that this company will issue important news on Monday that should seriously increase the stock price. Stock which you of course should buy to be in on this great opportunity.

Will the stock prize go up on Monday? O yes, it will already go up on Friday when a lot of ignorant people are buying the stocks. Seeing it being raised already on Friday, some of them may even buy more as they begin to believe in the ‘message’.

The big news on Monday is that there is no news, other than that one shareholder has been selling a lot. That shareholder was in on the spam “pump-and-dump" action and most likely was the only one who got some nice profit on his shares as the share price nicely went up. It can be very difficult to see if the message is spam or not. It might well be an official wanted stock market alert from your regular broker. But of course you would have his email address in your whitelist.

Norman is following these trends closely to make sure its products as Norman Email Protection is able to catch these forms of spam as efficiently as possible.