I have noticed that even though our providers promised to make .gif spam go away, I still get bundles of it (of course, it's automatically redirected to my Thunderbird trash folder). Although many of spam-fighters started employing the ocr tehnique to distinguish unsolicited adverts from pictures people send you, that tehnique is becoming obsolete, so it's advantage for the spammer team again.

How come, you might ask? Well, first of all, you must realize that spammers are people with no life whatsoever, so they have tons of time to devise vicious plots to make us all read their disgusting mail. For instance, John Graham-Cumming found a .gif spam message containing in fact three images:

"The first image is the GIF's background and is displayed for 10ms then the second image is layered on top with a transparent background so that the two images merge together and the image the spammer wants you to see appears. That image remains on screen for 100,000 ms (or 1 minute 40 seconds). After that the image is completely blanked out by the third frame.

My favourite touch is that it's not the entire image that's transparent, not even the white background, but just those pixels necessary to make the black pixels underneath show through. If you look carefully above you can see that some of pixels appear yellow (which is the background color of this site) indicating where the transparency is."

The spammer who thought of this has a terrible lack of human affection I think. Maybe he's ugly, maybe he reeks of garlic, but no person getting enough love could spend so much time plotting this.