Ordinary Nothing

Like almost anyone with an email address these days, I’m quite used to getting the general Nigerians needing help to smuggle money, or offers to enlarge my… err… mortgage. These are all non targeted. The senders got the email address from someplace or tried it randomly.

Today I got a new message, offering me to help promote my website. They had the real website address on the subject line and message body. It was even a website I know. Only it wasn’t mine.

Sans images and other HTML bits:

Hi,

I visited http://stupidsecurity.com, and noticed that you’re not listed on some search engines! I would like to introduce to you an affordable service where we can help enhance your online presence globally.

Search engine submission is an integral part of the success of your web site. Building a web presence means more than just having the right keywords. We offer a star solution that will produce guaranteed results. Our unique search engine positioning technology helps submit your website to over 300,000 search engines and directories every month.

It takes only minutes to sign up for our service. We’ll do the rest! You’ll be surprised how simple it is to now reach out to an international market and increase the visibility of your website.

Do let me know how I may assist you better with workmiracle.com!

Best Regards,
Elisabeth Brown

Sales and Marketing
E-mail: Elisabethbrown@workmiracle.com
http://www.workmiracle.com

Not interested in our www.workmiracle.com service? To be taken off our mailing list, please follow the instructions here.

Now Stupid Security is an excellent and most interesting site, but it’s hardly mine. It is on my blog-roll here, and I have a link to it on some post, but it doesn’t justify deciding it’s mine. And I didn’t get other copies of these message regarding other sites I link to from this blog.

The other option is that they got my email address from there, which is possible since I do have an account there. This seems even more silly, though. Someone should harvest email addresses from a website about security, and then go to all the posters there and offer them to promote the site ?

Yet I find it very hard to believe this was random. The likelihood is too small…

It’s a very targeted message, only targeted at the wrong person, and they had to know that by the way they got the addresses. That would make them both clever and extremely stupid.

Or was this the brainless human engineering trick where I’m supposed to think I got it by mistake, and why not take advantage of the wonderful offer myself? Some people are dumb enough for this, but how many of the people that post on Stupid Security are?
It would take more than a miracle to work…  ;-)

The offer of being indexed in no less than 300,000 search engines is very tempting, though. Especially since an alt tag on an image linked to from the message (not posted here) reads "Guaranteed search engine submission promotion optimixation services".
Who can resist being optimixed on so many search engines, by such professionals, eh?

November 15th, 2004 at 20:55 EET | Categories: Marketing | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.