Information week has a great article highlighting the return of spam in 2007.For the past two years, spam has been on a decline due to advanced filters and anti-spam services.

This coming year we will see a significant rise in the amount of spam sent to your inboxes.Signs of this development can be seen already according to a email filtering vendor known as Postini.They claim spam volumes have grown 73 percent in the last two months.

You can look forward to Spammers who are now embedding their messages in image files to get past spam filters that search for key words and phrases.Since filters are not yet fully capable of OCR(Optical Character Recognition) technology which to put it simple is a process in which digitised images can be scanned to retrieve text used inside of them.The number of emails with images has grown from nearly zero to almost 25 percent.

Spammers are also experimenting with text used inside of spam messages which can be tweaked easily to bypass conventional spam filters.

More spam is being sent from hijacked home PCs, making it harder for spam filters to block so-called blacklisted senders. Spammers are also getting better at identifying vulnerable PCs they can convert to botnets, the hijkacked PCs that are sending all this new spam.

You can definitely expect to find more spam in your mobile devices in the coming year.Spammers are turning to SMS, or text messages, as a way to target both mobile devices and PCs.There is little in terms of security for most cell phones, making them an easy target for spam and phishing attacks.Also most desktop email spam filters are not designed to handle spam or phishing attacks from SMS servers.