I’m sick of spammers. They’re a pox on humanity. My already cynical opinions are made all the more Hobbesian every time I see spam in my inbox. Mail.app’s junk mail filters are generally really quite good but a certain type of spam consistently gets through. Specifically, spam that contains HTML with an image placed on top and some non-spammy-ish text written underneath. The non-spammy text keeps Mail from seeing it as spam and Mail can’t read the text in images. Short of good OCR, there isn’t much Mail can do except to find patterns in format. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do that.

That’s when I turn to applescript.

Applescript is the balm that heals most wounds. I base many opinions of applications based on their support for applescript. Here, applescript can help fix image spam. Sure, there’s a fix that purports to can this spam. That fix should work fairly well for most. I, however, don’t like the idea of catching false positives. Applescript can further refine the results and help eliminate false positives.

Download Can Image Spam script.

A screenshot of my rule setup is in the extended entry.

That lets me only work with people I don’t know and are likely to be HTML/spam. While I’m at it, I set the background color of each message so that I can easily spot them when something comes in. I then run my script. So far, things are working out fairly well.