The flow of spam messages has nearly doubled from last year and junk email now accounts for more than 9 of every 10 e-mail messages sent over the Internet.
The nature of spam has however changed - as internet email companies like GMail and Yahoo improve their text spam filters, the spammers have now switched to image spam where the advertisements are embedded in a picture as a .gif or .jpg file with no text in the message body and so they often miss the radar of spam filters.
If image spam is clogging your GMail inbox, here's a simple trick to route the spam message back to the Trash folder automatically.
Step 1: Choose "Create a Filter" [equivalent to creating Rules in Microsoft Outlook]
Step 2: Type "multipart/related .gif" in the field - Has the Words and also check the field "Has Attachment"
Step 3: Click next and select "Delete It" to move the spam message automatically to the GMail Trash folder bypassing the Inbox.
Important: There's a remote possibility that the above GMail filter might move some important email from real senders to the Trash folder. So if you want to play extra safe, create a new folder (label) in gmail and change the above rule to move all the messages to this new folder. You can always clean up the "probably spam" folder in your free time.
Reader Comments
why we need to space between 'multipart/related' and '.gif'?
Written on 7/12/06 5:49 AM
How do you create a new folder in GMail. Actually, I'd prefer just to be able to move messages with that label to the Spam folder, how would I do that?
Written on 7/12/06 5:04 PM
Constant struggle to be ahead between the spammers and the Mail Companies.
Who dares wins.
Rajeev
www.tekno-world.blogspot.com
Written on 7/12/06 5:48 PM
David - You can create a new label inside GMail which is equivalent to creating a new folder in Yahoo or Hotmail.
Just set your email to filter to appy this label to potential spam messages and archive it (which is equivalent to moving message in that folder)
Written on 7/12/06 6:10 PM
A couple of days ago, TOI Mumbai said "
If anyone claims that Mumbai's property prices have soared sky-high, dont believe it. The truth is that they have now shot through the stratosphere." after a flat in Cuffe Parade was sold at Rs 73,000 per sqft.
If one could compare Real-Estate with Email-Spam, he would definitely say, the latter has crossed the Exosphere
Written on 7/12/06 6:30 PM
this is not at all effective.
i am member for pravas, they are not at all spam, they are also having some attachment with gif and having type multipart.. so, that does not mean its a spam..
if we do this, we can loose some of our important mails !! take care before applying this filter
Written on 8/12/06 4:17 PM
Instead of doing it this way, I have always found it effective to mark any sucn messages as "Spam" in Gmail. Generally only a few such messages come through and the more that you mark them as Spam, the better the protection becomes.
Written on 13/12/06 12:41 AM
This kind of strategy of spammers really gives a headache to many. Since there's no text to filter, you cannot auto trash these emails. You can't also filter them by email address or domain name as they use junk words or texts. If you filter them by image, your good ones could be also filtered with them. The best solution that I know is to make a filter that will receive only emails from the email addresses or domains that you listed - whitelisting strategy.
Written on 1/3/07 8:54 AM
How do you make sure youll always get emails from safe addys? Does labeling them do the job?
Written on 9/8/07 7:04 AM