Thanks For Being Polite Mr Spammer

I wasn’t sure if I should bother writing this post as it’s not in any way educational or designed to be helpful, rather it’s just an observation of mine which I thought was interesting. On the other hand it’s entirely possible you will have experienced this yourself lately so I I thought ‘why not’, and decided to get it out there.

Like many people I have subscriptions to a number of other internet marketers lists, mainly to see what they are promoting and how they go about doing it, after all one of the best ways to learn is to check out what the big players are doing.

In general I get quite a few emails per day offering me the latest and greatest thing to hit internet marketing and in most cases I’ll take a quick look and then delete the email so that it doesn’t clog up my inbox as it’s pretty rare these days for me to buy a product during it’s launch.

Recently I’ve noticed that my email address appears to have found it’s way into the hands of a few unknown internet marketers who have either purchased my name from someone else or simply scraped it off the internet and chucked into their autoresponder.

That’s not that big a deal, we all have to wade through spam now and then. What was interesting however is that I’ve noticed that in many cases the people who are sending me emails all appear to have adopted the exact same approach to trying to keep me on their lists (which I didn’t sign up to in the first place).

Basically regardless of the message they are trying to get across the first paragraph will always go to great pains to thank me for being a wonderful subscriber and taking the time to read their emails, which is ironic because I never wanted them in the first place.

Following this they insist that as a reward for reading their emails so diligently I will get rewarded by getting access to some wonderful product or service for nothing, generally because they’ve convinced the owner to provide them with secret access, only for their subscribers.

Of course it makes it easy to recognise these types of email as most of the time they come from some bizarre senders name instead of one that I might possibly recognise or at least a person’s name, half the time it’s “Alert” or “Urgent Message”.

And then of course there are those that masquerade as notifications from Facebook, Twitter or Paypal in their subject line but still insist on using ridiculous sender names that you know none of those companies would ever use. Heck, while writing this post I received an email with the subject “About your negative account balance” from a sender called “Warning”.

So what’s the point I am trying to make… in all honesty there isn’t really one other than to highlight how absurd these spam messages seem to be these days. And as the title alludes to it’s quite interesting to be told how valuable a subscriber I am and to be thanked for reading when I never asked for the information in the first place.

I will ask you this though, what’s the most absurd or ridiculously spam you’ve received recently? Drop me a comment as I’m fascinated to hear your stories about the crazy emails you might be receiving and whether or not they’re anything like mine.