If you’re getting lots of image spam (e-mails with nothing in the body but an image), your spam filter is not likely to be stopping it because it can’t scan the message for text and keywords.

Of course, wherever there’s a problem, the geek community responds, and in this case does a magnificent job.

Tim Gaden at Hawk Wings, also a victim, elaborates on how to set up this rule, as a trick is involved. To summarize:

* for the first condition, select ‘Edit Header List…’
* in its accompanying option, chose ‘Content-Type’ (or create it if you have to)
* The Content-Type option will then take first place in the rule (or you might have to select it from the criteria list), allowing you to finish building the rule as pictured

The rule is based off of Bill’s observation that these spam emails always come from a different address, and the content type header (as you might now assume) begins with multipart/related’.

Of course, this tip is specifically for Apple’s Mail.app, but I’ve also set up a similar rule in MS Outlook. Guess what?

It works. And it works well. In fact, every image spam has been moved to my junk folder upon receipt.

Well done, Tim!

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