New innovations in spam

I received the following (unsolicited) email today:

Hello Andrew,

I’m interested in whether you are accepting guest article submissions for your site Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science? I’m the owner of the recently created nonprofit site OnlineEngineeringDegree.org and am interested in writing / submitting an article for your consideration to be published on your site. Is that something you’d be willing to consider, and if so, what specs in terms of topics or length requirements would you be looking for?

Thanks you for your time, and if you have any questions or are interested, I’d appreciate you letting me know.

Sincerely,
Samantha Rhodes

Huh?

P.S. My vote for most obnoxious spam remains this one, which does its best to dilute whatever remains of the reputation of Wolfram Research. Or maybe that particular bit of spam was written by a particularly awesome cellular automaton that Wolfram discovered? I guess in the world of big-time software it’s ok to lie if it might net you a bit of money.

9 thoughts on “New innovations in spam

  1. I would have played along. It would be even more interesting in terms of spam innovation to see what the article would say.

  2. I was actually looking up different type of spam filters the other day. I'm not sure which type your email uses, but if your site uses the bayesian spam filtering I could see it sliding through.

  3. Are any of you getting (what I like to call) analytics spam? I.e. incoming hits from some site which *doesn't* actually link to you, but tempts you to check it out. I've been getting inbound hits from (of all things) fake pill sellers.

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