I just got a spam email containing no attached images, no advertising pitches, no URLs, and indeed nothing but four letters and two digits, rendered as ASCII-art, entirely out of digits, a little like: 
  3822  63748   90678  64826  109067      058   09405
 09  40 53  26 90      86  30 94           05       38
 47  07 10985  11      34  53 84059        76   96534
 961179 64  23 36      64  57 63           53  22
 42  52 12659   82391  26911  126422  75  2307 8174775
(This is an impression; the actual digits and the represented text were changed.)

What could this be? Is it some online version of graffiti tagging, calculated to be as obnoxiously intrusive as the real-world equivalent? Secret al-Qaeda messages to sleeper agents? A brand-building campaign for some product? Or something else altogether?

Posted by: Ed | http://asseptic.org/blog/ | Fri Nov 17 16:42:44 2006

Got one too. It said "Tora.08" in numbers.

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org/acb/ | Fri Nov 17 17:44:55 2006

Yep, that's the one. Which looks like a tag to me; though, given that Tora was a WW2 Japanese kamikaze battlecry, the idea of it being a triggger for suicide operations does occur.

Posted by: alecm | | Sat Nov 18 11:07:36 2006

I got the TORA mail too, but it followed a pump-and-dump spam for some stock called TORA.<something>- I presume someone decided to see if this ascii art might work to help, and would bypass spam filters...

Posted by: Richard | http://mechanicalcat.net/richard/log | Sat Nov 18 23:08:28 2006

I've been noticing spam that has no link in it -- unless there was some hidden h@xpl01t targetted at Outlook in it, the spam serves no purpose except (when not caught by my spam filter) increasing brand awareness...

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