Image-only adult themed spam

Lately there is a new batch of spam going out that tends to use adult themed subjects, but has no content in the body aside from a single image.

It has been reported that this SpamAssassin rule helps:

header __CTYPE_MULTIPART_MXD Content-Type =~ /multipart\/mixed/i
mimeheader __ANY_TEXT_ATTACH Content-Type =~ /text\/\w+/i
meta MIME_IMAGE_ONLY (__CTYPE_MULTIPART_MXD && __ANY_IMAGE_ATTACH && !__ANY_TEXT_ATTACH)
score MIME_IMAGE_ONLY 2.00
describe MIME_IMAGE_ONLY Image body part but no text body parts

To use it, copy these five lines into the bottom of your \MDaemon\SpamAssassin\rules\local.cf file, then either restart MDaemon or create a mdspamd.sem file in the \MDaemon\App\ directory.

You may want to tweak the “Score”, but start with 2.0 as this rule hasn’t been aggressively tested so there is a higher risk of false positives then with the default SpamAssassin rules.

Lastly, it’s also worth mentioning that Outbreak Protection (part of SecurityPlus 4 and higher) is flagging these messages as spam.

UPDATE 2009/05/19: The above rule only works in MDaemon 10 and higher, for earlier versions, you’ll need one more line:

mimeheader __ANY_IMAGE_ATTACH Content-Type =~ /image\/(?:gif|jpeg|png)/
(Thanks goes to “Greg Vancardo” for tracking this one down)

Spam Filter responding slowly

Recently “DSBL”, one of the DNSBLs used in SpamAssassin, changed their DNS to point to an unrouteable IP.

The lookup is still in the SA 3.24 rules MDaemon uses. If you have DNS service available set to Yes or Test, that might be slowing down SA processing. Try adding the following line to your \MDaemon\SpamAssassin\rules\local.cf file.

score RCVD_IN_DSBL 0

Once this is done, open a command prompt and type the following command to reload your SpamAssassin rules, and/or restart MDaemon;

echo. > C:\MDaemon\App\mdspamd.sem