Is a picture SPAM?

NO – a picture is NOT SPAM by itself. If somebody sends you a picture why would that be SPAM? SPAM is emails from people you do not know and typically either come from an impersonator or a “do-not-reply” email address.

Impersonation we can solve with sender verification such as SPF.

“Do-not-reply” is an oxymoron – why do you send me correspondence i cannot reply to – monologues are for soap boxes.

If an email from a friend goes to SPAM because it had a picture embedded the there’s something wrong with the filter.

When can we get to the day when WE decide what’s SPAM and what’s not – why do we have all these robotic filters making up our minds for us based upon such faulty logic?

Spam filters are obsolete

SPAM or Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE) is a common inconvenience for e-mail users. UBE-filters are supposed to catch problematic messages that the filter believes is unwanted for the end user. It would be an equivalent to having someone go through all your snail mail and then decide what you should get and what should go directly to trash. The UBE filters look for many different things such as key words, pictures, links and the combination thereof. The main problem with UBE is impersonation and the best solution on the market today is something called SPF (Sender Policy Framework), also known as Sender ID. SPF is a statement that resides in the domain record and ONLY the administrator of a domain can alter this statement, spammers can NOT! All leading UBE-filters look for the SPF statement and more and more emails are being deleted based upon the lack of such a statement.

The UBE-filters normally have a setting to detect the SPF but if this is not turned on then emails with, for example, a logo in the signature or several links in the text might get deleted or sent to UBE folder even though the sender is known and accepted to/by the recipient.

SPF is CRUCIAL for everyone in the immediate future as the lack thereof will lead to more and more emails NOT being delivered to the intended recipient and this WITHOUT notice to the sender! The bottom line is that nothing is perfect and nobody should trust mail or email 100% and it is therefore just plain common sense to follow up on important emails (actually a good reason to touch base is to ask ”did you get my email?”)

The world is moving towards more pictures and links in emails and thus it becomes of the utmost importance to ”authorize” the sender which the SPF statement does. 90+% of all spam is impersonation, easily detected by verifying the sender. Furthermore most spam today does NOT contain pictures but just text.

If we only verified that the sender is authentic then why have any filters that look for anything else? If an authentic sender starts sending junk then the human recipient can easily put the sender on their junk list as opposed to leaving that decision to a filter that works off faulty logic.