According to new spam stats from McAfee, the amount of aggravating spam sent as embedded e-mail images plunged recently.

The Avert Lab blog post says that after accounting for about 60% of all spam in the first quarter of the year, the amount of image spam seen by the company fell to 12% earlier this week.

Part of the reason for the decline, according to Nick Kelly, the post's author, is that the spammers are now tending to include a link to a hosted image rather than directly embedding it in an e-mail. Kelly says that doesn't account for the full drop, though.

And the plunge may have been a temporary, though welcome, hiatus. Kelly says that over the last 24 hours, image spam has jumped to 31% of all spam.

This news comes on the heels of a Pew study that suggests we're less bothered by spam even as we receive more of it.

Me, I'm still mystified that most spam has any chance whatsoever of succeeding. Seriously, I'd really like to meet the people who actually buy stock they see touted by pump-and-dump image spam, just to see whether they're wearing velcro shoes because lace-ups are too confusing. Sure, some might be trying to jump on the scam bandwagon themselves, but those wanna-be's can't account for all the purchases seen.

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