A while back I posted a small rant about stock quote spams using images to bypass the spam filter I have on my mail server here at home.

I've been using spamassassin locally since the start of 2004, and keeping a tally of the number of spams I've received each month. At its worst it was over 7,000 a month (a peril of having had an online presence since 1991). Since I started using Internet blacklists and handling the mail completely locally (rather than fed through my ISP's mail server) late last year, that was cut down to around 750 in May this year, but has crept up again since.

Well, now someone has written a plugin for spamassassin which attacks the image spam problem. It looks for any images in incoming emails, does OCR and then does some fuzzy text matching to find anything that l00k5 l!ke 5p#m.

So, fingers crossed, FuzzyOcr should prevent a lot of those mails from being able to bypass the filtering. Now we'll just have to wait and see what delightful innovation in spam technology comes next...