[Spambayes] Inspecting images (was: SpamBayes to HandleEmbeddedImages)

[Coe, Bob]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: spambayes-bounces at python.org 
> [mailto:spambayes-bounces at python.org] On Behalf Of Vincent Zweije
> Sent: Monday, October 03, 2005 9:40 AM
> To: spambayes at python.org
> Subject: Re: [Spambayes] Inspecting images (was: SpamBayes to 
> HandleEmbeddedImages)
> 
> 
> On Mon, Oct 03, 2005 at 09:31:35AM -0400, Jesse Pelton wrote:
> 
> ||  Of course, whatever the approach, the images must be fetched,
> || which often means letting the spammer know that you've received
> || (and seemingly viewed) their message, which encourages more
> || messages.  If such a feature were to be added, it should be
> || disabled by default.
> 
> Bah.  Good point, given that, as I suppose, most images are 
> not in the spam itself.  I never bother to check, as I don't 
> view images in mutt.

But not retrieving the image may not do any harm. Recognizing spamlike
patterns in an encoded image is a hard problem, while classifying the
image's URL as spamlike is easy. (If the spammer wants you to see the
image, he can't disguise the URL very much.) I'd guess that working with
URLs only would give better results.

Bob