[Mimedefang] Image validator/OCR SA plugin

[Dave Williss]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gary Funck" <gary at intrepid.com>
To: <mimedefang at lists.roaringpenguin.com>
Sent: Sunday, April 16, 2006 6:34 PM
Subject: RE: [Mimedefang] Image validator/OCR SA plugin


> Martin wrote:
>> But problably the spammers
>> will soon change their tricks to different images which are more
>> difficult to read :-(
>>
>> http://antispam.imp.ch/patches/patch-ocrtext
>
> On this topic, Nick FitzGerald mentioned this article,
> http://www.jgc.org/blog/2006/01/do-spammers-fear-ocr.html
>
> Sunday, January 15, 2006
> Do spammers fear OCR?
> Nick FitzGerald recently sent me two sample spams that seem to indicate 
> that
> some spammers fear that using images in place of words isn't enough. 
> They've
> started to obscure their messages to prevent optical character 
> recognition.

I'm afraid they'll start using OCR themselves.  One common trick to allow a 
web
site to have an email address humanly readable but not harvestable is to put 
it
in an image.  That may not be so safe any more :-(  Of course, they'd have 
to
scan an awful lot of images in the hopes of finding an email address in any
of them, so they may not find it worth the effort.