"Image is everything," or so the saying goes. For more than 1 trillion spam messages sent since April (yes, that's 1,000,000,000,000), image has literally been everything. No text, no numbers, no hyperlinks in these spams; just an image.

True, there are commercial solutions to combat this nightmare, but much of the enterprise market and most e-mail users worldwide are not yet protected by any of these solutions. Some vendors believe their product is the solution, but it's not that simple: An enterprise needs to have the time and budget to implement a new solution to stop the nightmare. And most users in small businesses, nonprofits and developing nations have neither the staff nor budget for an enterprise-grade solution.

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The other side - John Veizades, Mirapoint
Is imaged-based spam a nightmare?

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More than 15 billion image spams flood the Internet per day, a tenfold increase since 2005. The average image-spam message size is 50KB, which is 10 times larger than conventional spam. These larger message sizes, combined with the increased spam volume, have caused many fragile e-mail infrastructures to buckle under the load.

More of this spam is evading filters for two reasons. First, image-spam advertisements consist of an embedded file attachment such as a .gif or .jpg without any meaningful text in the message. Most other spam includes some meaningful text and a clickable URL that spam filters can detect. Eliminating many of the common techniques used to stop spam reduces catch rates and increases the amount of spam arriving in the in-box.