Here's a screen shot of my phone Messaging app's Spam folder:
Apparently when the app sees a message from a new-to-me number that contains a picture, the app chucks that message into the spam bin.
If you read the text of those messages, you'll see that they're political fundraisers. I guess there's some received wisdom among political fundraisers that pictures boost the effectiveness of fundraising texts. But as near as I can tell, the pictures just cause those messages to get automatically tossed.
(Here, some spam-fighting experts want to interrupt to say that I must have trained my app to trash these messages by marking similar messages as spam. But until recently, I was using Signal as my text-message app.)
?Maybe? not every phone's built-in messaging app defaults to discarding these messages. (Maybe this is an Android-vs-iPhone difference?) And ?maybe? the picture boosts the fundraising-effectiveness of a message so much on phones that do receive the messages that it's overall worth it to include a picture.
Maybe?
Anyhow, I kinda suspect that there's a bunch of political fundraising consultants all telling each other that including a picture is a "best practice" but it's been a while since any of them tried an experiment to figure out if that picture actually boosts or bumbles.
