If there is one thing that everybody can agree it is that spam is a right royal pain the ass. If there is another then it is that image spam is the biggest pain in the ass of all. While it is bad enough for the end user, especially at the smaller end of the scale where desktop filtering clients are the order of the day because there isn’t the budget to support enterprise grade server side solutions, the real victims are the service providers. Think about it, these guys are getting hit by an enormous volume of unwanted traffic, saturating bandwidth and costing them not inconsiderable amounts of money.
Which is why you should not be surprised to learn that one of the latest breakthrough developments in the fight against image spam has not emerged from the research labs of some security vendor or one of the big names in the established anti-spam game, but rather it is a web hosting company that is making that announcement this week.