Spammers have discovered a new trick.

According to a report in USA Today, image-based spam is experiencing a huge growth spurt. Late last year it accounted for 1% of total spam messages; now it has suddenly risen to 21%.

In the newspaper article, journalist Jon Swartz describes the problem:

The newest spam uses technology that varies the content of individual messages — through colors, backgrounds, picture sizes or font types — so they appear to be distinct to spam filters… As a result, the messages are like snowflakes: No two are alike… The surge in new spam has largely eluded software filters and eaten up space on e-mail systems because each message is more than seven times larger than regular spam…

I’ve certainly noticed a recent surge in the amount of spam getting past Apple Mail’s excellent Junk Filter.

Much of it is image-based, although I am favoured more with various aids for my sexual potency than with the stock scams that are usually associated with image spam.

Mail’s Junk filter, based on Latent Semantic Analysis, only gets smarter as it goes along. I hope it is not a slow learner. Although, since the filter is text-based, this new form of spam may have outflanked it.

[Thanks, Bob]mail.app, apple mail, spam, junk filter, images, email, Internet, stock scams

Cloud.lic.io.us is a widget that helps you quickly access your delic.io.us tags and bookmarks.

A new version was released today, which adds a “fancy slider” to the widget and a fix for changes in the delic.io.us API.

The widget offers a number of options to control the display of your tags.

You can choose — as you can in delic.io.us itself — to view only tags with one, two or five matches and more:

Clicking one of the tags opens a slider drawer which displays the matching URLs. You can click on them to open them directly or jump to the display of the URLs in delic.io.us itself by clicking the arrow on the bottom of the drawer:

Cloud.lic.io.us looks like it is freeware and the latest patched version is available from the developer’s web site .delicious, widget, productivity, tags, bookmarks, not apple mail

voiceNote is a clever service that allows you to add audio clips as notes to your Backpack pages.

It requires you to register your name, email address, the URL of your Backpack page and its email address on the voiceNote web site .

Then a quick call from your mobile/cell, work or home phone adds an audio note to your page:

This allows you to capture your killer thought on the move or in the car. By registering and sharing your voiceNote number, you can even use it as a voicemail service for friends or for work.

Currently the service is in beta and works for the cost of a local phone call in the following major US cities: Denver, CO, Washington, DC, Chicago, IL, New York, NY, Pittsburgh, PA, Houston, TX and Seattle, WA.

I thought San Francisco was the beating heart of all things Web 2.0. Surprising not to see it on the list.

The service is free.backpack, voice mail, cell, mobile, notes, audio, productivity

Kim Cavanaugh and Fraser Speirs are both feeling strangely unsettled and unhappy with Mail.app. Somehow the love is fading.

Kim finds that Mail treats their relationship with less respect than it once did. Now it lets all sorts of spam into his Inbox.

Now back in the day, those would have gone directly into the Junk folder. But not now. Something has changed. Somehow you just don’t seem to care anymore.

Fraser can’t put a finger on his dis-ease. Mail.app, he says, has simply been “behaving atrociously for me over the past couple of days”.

And he is not confident that a better email client will ever emerge:

This is one area where Apple’s involvement has not benefited consumers because Apple’s offering is uncharacteristically poor. There is some demand for such a product and I’m sure there are developers able to build a good mail client. Unfortunately, Apple’s presence in the market with an almost-good-enough free product makes it an exceptionally risky investment for any company.

Of course one never knows what’s just around the corner. It’s possible that Leopard will fix all Mail’s ills and give it a fresh injection of life. Who knows. Communication with the user community is not a strong point with the Mail Development Team.

As far as I know there are only two other hopes on the horizon. Allan Odgaard of TextMate fame has hinted that a friend of his is working on a new email client. If Allan is involved, I’d have high hopes for the finished product.

Matt Ronge is also working on a new IMAP-focussed mail client, Kiwi.

As a hard-core email client monogamist, I’m never tempted to stray. Even in deepest Mail.app IMAP hell, I know the relationship is making me a better person. As the good book says,

suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.

mail.app, apple mail, unhappy users, gripes, spam, IMAP, email clients, seven year itch

Leander Kahney loves the way that Apple Mail reformats the date of an email on the fly as you resize the Date column in the List Viewer.

Other clients display an ellipsis or just chop the date off, but Mail is in a class of its own:

…only Apple’s Mail actually changes the format. When I first discovered this, I sat there delighted, making the column wide and then narrow, beaming as the date format switched smoothly and seamlessly between numbers and text to perfectly fit the space allocated.

Part of the magic of this discovery was the serendipity. If it had been a “feature” — a behavior purposely brought to my attention by Apple — I would have shrugged and said, “so what?” But because I discovered it by accident, it struck me as artisan touch; a craftsman’s attention to detail.

For him it is a reminder of the repeated way in which “Apple delights with its focus on the user experience”.

Surely it is just coincidence, but it is nice to read Leander’s epiphany after a month in which Mail.app gave Mark Pilgrim an excuse to switch away from OS X altogether.mail.app, apple mail, user interface, usability, happy users, apple, mac osx

Intelligent Mechatronic Systems Inc (IMS) has announced that it will soon release a “hands-free and eyes-free mobile email solution” which will keep drivers in touch more safely when they are on the road.

iLane is a box about the size of a home modem-router that sits in your glove box. Its voice-based interface can tell you when new emails arrive on your handheld, read a summary of the message and then listen as you dictate a reply or forward an attachment.

Unlike other voice-based solutions, iLane does not require a remote server to convert emails into voice files. It does all the work in your glove box.

Because it frees your hands and eyes from your handheld, it helps you to “stay connected to critical information without sacrificing your on-road safety.”

The web site claims that the device works with “BlackBerry handheld devices running the BlackBerry OS 4.0 and up. iLane will also support Bluetooth-enabled handheld devices and smart-phones that run on the Palm OS, Windows Mobile OS and Symbian OS.”

The iLane web site contains a FAQ and an opportunity to sign up for news of its actual roll-out. email, handheld, mobile, blackberry, car, wireless, voice recognition, cell phone

One in three bloggers regard their work as journalism according to a new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Although Apple has now dropped its law suit against Think Secret et al., one of the key issues was whether bloggers are journalists and enjoy the same rights as more traditional media.

Pew Internet’s ambitious study which covers the demographics, motivation, activity, audience and technology of bloggers found that most bloggers write to be creative or express themselves. (Apparently journalists don’t do this).

Only a minority engaged in what the survey called “journalistic activities”:

Oddly, several important journalistic activities are missing. On the one hand there’s nothing about a thirst for the truth or a commitment to the public interest. On the other, no mention of a knack for pounding out product placements as if they were reviews, taking care not to upset companies that advertise in the same enterprise and writing whatever the editor serves up whether they know anything about it or not.

It is unfortunate that the survey is not very reliable. While the survey concludes that 12 million people in the USA maintain a blog, it only conducted telephone interviews with 233 of them and the self-declared margin of error is +/- 7%.

It also seems untroubled by the semantic can of worms opened up by words like blogger and journalist open up.

Still, if you are interested in the snapshot of bloggers that the survey offers, you can download a 33 page PDF summary of its findings. blogging, bloggers, survey, journalists, demographics