Back in the pre-Web days, heck, in the pre-WYSIWYG word processing days, a common way to make big type was the Unix banner program (here’s a link to the man page). In these days of HTML, HTML email, and Microsoft Word, the banner program has fallen into disuse, a relic of the moldy ASCII past. Imagine my surprise when I saw it repurposed by spammers. Over the past few days I’ve gotten a lot of spam with a message body like this:

#    #     #      ##     ####   #####     ##
#    #     #     #  #   #    #  #    #   #  #
#    #     #    #    #  #       #    #  #    #
#    #     #    ######  #  ###  #####   ######
#  #      #    #    #  #    #  #   #   #    #
##       #    #    #   ####   #    #  #    #

I don’t think it will take spam filters too long to catch on, but I give the spammers points for creativity.