Glued-body spam proves ineffective

Spam messages that seemingly contain no information have been spotted in circulation by security firm Symantec.

However, though the body of the email and the subject line are completely blank, it seems that spammers are attempting to bypass spam filters by putting their message into other parts of the email.

Symantec is calling the phenomenon 'glued-body' spam, as the body of the message is 'glued' to another part of the message such as the header.

The spammers are doing this seemingly in the hope that the email client will somehow manage to display the data to the recipient. However, these hopes seem to be in vain.

"The bad news for spammers is that even if their message does get through anti-spam filters, a lot of people will not see the advertisement - definitely reducing the click-through rates and thereby the profit," said Trevor Mack of Symantec.

A recent report from rival security firm McAfee claimed that global spam levels are now almost back at the level seen before the notorious McColo web-hosting service was shut down in November 2008.