I’m surprised it hasn’t happened earlier. Spammers have increasingly taken to displaying the text of their messages in images to defeat e-mail spam filters 1 Currently there are filtering software out there that can read text in images. There is OCR Bridge software that can read text from images (like when you scan a text document), but they are unreliable, especially when used on documents with non-typical fonts.

Of course, some e-mail software doesn’t display images in software and nowadays most e-mail software hat does display images in an e-mail warn you first and ask you if you’d like to display the images by default. I’m not sure that this will work out well for those poor Spammers that we all feel so sorry for!