There's no law that says that "content-filters" can't recognize
identical pictures. Spam pictures are likely to vary less than spam
URLs pointing to pictures. That's not to say that spam pictures won't
vary, but that the easiest variations in URLs such as %-encoding and
user:password@ are lost if you send the picture instead of a pointer
to the picture.
There are a lot of programs already in use that create custom images.
So basically the cost of sending each message goes up by one GIF
compression.
There are ways of detecting images that have been slightly modified
but they are very CPU intensive.
Such changes will cause fewer total graphics in all mail, if you count
URLs pointing to pictures as "graphics," as I think you must. Some
people who now include completely unneeded pictures, logos, icons,
and so forth will think twice when their mail bloats by 50 or 500
KBytes. Note that I wrote "some people" instead of "everyone." Many
people won't notice or understand, at least not a first.
To first order the only people who will notice are people who are on
dialup. The majority of Internet users would not know a megabyte if
it hit them in the middle of the street.
If at first
there are significantly more graphics, outfits like MSN and Hotmail
will have bloating disk space reasons figure out how to let their
users know. For example, they might make the "Size" indications in
folders harder to ignore, or they might expire big messages sooner.
More likely they will only accept large images from sources that
authenticate themselves in some fashion.
The killer app for Hotmail is sending pictures of cousin Neville to
aunt Mabel, neither of whom know anything about computers.
Phill
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