In the first chapter of the Badger book we used form letters as an example of how (and why) you might use templates. We built a simple mail template containing a few variables and showed how you would process that using tpage to expand the variables and create a letter. It’s an obvious example to choose. I’ve used it in introductory Template Toolkit talks for years. We finished that example by saying

Process the same template a few thousand times with different sets of data and you have the entire basis of the junk-mail industry

Those words have come back to haunt me recently as my spam folder has been overrun with messages containing headers like this:

From: [% from_name %]
To: [% to_name %]
Subject: [% subject %]

The unexpanded tags indicate that even if spammers are using better tools, many of them still aren’t intelligent enough to use them properly.

But I’m very sorry if whoever wrote this TT-based spamming tool got the idea after reading our book.