What are those? Some funny icons in Spam

[Khoan Cat Be Tong]

Hello Everybody,

I don't know why some emails in my Spam like this:

Icon with many color is animated. I don't think Google doesn't filter crazy codes from email messages.

Are spammers  creative?

[Sean Murphy]

    Sort of. Most if not all spam is sent by automated programs, but the more code they can sneak into the spam, the better they can tell if it ever gets opened or received, thus confirming active emails which the spammers can sell to each other for supplementary income.

On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 1:31 AM, Khoan Cat Be Tong wrote:

Are spammers  creative?

[Xander]

I opened the only animated example currently in my spambucket in the debugger, and it's a gif that gmail has copied to their own google server. 

(There's a possibility that this heart gif was from a standard set, but...)

my main theory is that gmail copied the image from the spammer's server before serving the email up to me, which could have been for persistence or anti-beacon reasons.