Yes, Mr Spam in god-knows-what-country (cough cough America!) got smart.

Many of you may have already used Spam prevention software, either server or client side, such as Spam-Assassin or the usual Apple Mail or Microsoft Outlook builtin software.
This type of prevention is usually based on looking at the subject or body and crosschecking the words against a ‘ban list’, if the work is found in the list it is either discarded so you don’t ever see it, or its tagged in some way to notify you that it is potentially spam.
I tend to have it just rewrite the subject line with **SPAM** so it still reaches my inbox and from there i am able to sift the real spam, from the emails the system thinks is spam.

Just when you thought that you were getting used to this type of system, and its all up and working and your ‘ban list’ is growing and filtering much better, you get a dreaded piece of spam that looks like it should have been spotted…
The email has all the words in your ‘ban list’ yet it didnt get pulled.

You wonder why?! Its a bloody image!
Yes, Big Wig Spam has looked at how the most common spam prevention software works, and found a genius way around it.
Because the body of the email is an image, the spam software cannot read it and so it looks like you standard email!
One way of getting around these emails is to block all the emails from the domain it has originated from.
But what happens when you block ‘hotmail.com’?
Well your friends emails will never reach because you have essentially blocked EVERY hotmail.com user, Whoops!

Currently i have not come across any software that is able to read the images within an email to determine if it should be blocked, it must be possible because some websites make use of images with a code word in them that you have to type in to authenticate yourself as an actual human being.
The text in the image is skewed and messed for a reason, so that people with automated software cannot read them easily to make sense of what it says.

That would definatly be a piece of software i can see millions of email users rejoycing about!