A lot of spam emails that I have received contain images. Perhaps this is because images cannot be scanned for words and thus filtered by programs like MW?

I have read in the forums how email headers contain misleading information making filtering hard for MW. What about filtering of HTML email that load images based on the web site from where the image is loaded?

This is the same idea as advertisement blocking add-ons for browsers where images are not loaded based on the website address.

So a solution would be to have a second blacklist, a website blacklist. Emails loading images, or with web addresses, that match an entry on the website blacklist would be considered to be spam.

Would this work?

Couldn't you just create a filter that looks for the web-site in the "body"?

Absolutely. I had thought of using this approach. However, the list of websites will grow, simular to the email address blacklist. I would think the number of sites you would want to check against would be greater than the filter could handle?

Being inbuilt, I could have drag-and-drop web addresses (simular to email addresses) and it would be easier to maintain (add, delete, etc).

I've given up on "Blacklisting". These days all I have is my [Friends] list and [Filters] (all set to [Delete]).

Haven't had any SPAM get through, but I do have to be careful to vett the items marked for [Delete], to make sure they don't contain *real* mail from people not yet added to my [Friends] list.

As you say everything else just grows and grows (and slows down MWP)

True. True.

I had just observed that my list of websites for advertisement blocking is much smaller than the MWP email blacklist. I thought it could be another approach for certain types of emails such as HTML emails.

These types of spam emails need a vaild website to load the images and for you to 'click-to' to buy a product/service or to register/unregister etc. And the 'return-path' and 'from' email address is a 'don't care'. Thus they can resend the email infinitum with different email addresses. The web site is the constant?

If the spammers remove the web addresses from the email, then they would have to have text to promote their product/service. As the text is part of the email, it can be filtered.

So hopefully it becomes 'damned if you do, damned if you don't'. However, I do not know if my premise is correct.