BoingBoing reader and accidental sex-spam-sleuth Alias observes:
"Because GMail (and other popular email clients these days) blocks images by default, porn spammers have now begun to use 1980s style ASCII art in order to get their message across.
This textfile contains one simple example, with the words HOT GIRLS in big letters – it cunningly gets past spam filters by not containing any actual words in the body text. As its content is only apparent to humans, it will be tricky to catch by any filters – as long as the whitespace remains intact, the actual text can just be any random garbage. In theory, every spam email could be totally unique.
I confidently expect to see a renaissance in erotic ASCII art in the coming months, until someone figures out how to filter out this type of spam…"
Reader Xopl replies,
"Well, ASCII text spam messages are actually pretty easy to filter. You just render the text, and then use technology similar to an OCR to see if it spells anything. Now, if they start doing actual ascii-porn images… that's difficult. But frankly, I'm not sure I'd mind."
Link to spam-specimen (*.txt)
