Spam levels are at a 19-month high, with spammers stuffing our inboxes with oodles and oodles of "image spam."
A report from Symantec-owned e-mail protection company MessageLabs Intelligence on spam and virus levels through the month of April said that e-mails containing image attachments, such as .gif or .jpg files, are frequently CRAMMED WITH SPAM. Such images are usually text rendered to look like an image in order to evade traditional spam flitering. MessageLabs said that image spamming peaked in 2007, but now these fraudulent images are being hosted on what appear to be trustworthy sites, but they are full of redirection links.
In the month of April, the global ratio of spam in e-mail traffic was 85%, or about 1 in 1.17 e-mails, MessageLabs claimed. That number was a 9.6% increase from the month prior. Spam levels in the U.S. was 79% and was highest in China at 90%.