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.