Gary Gale

Like most people, my email Inbox gets hit with a lot of spam on a daily basis. Most of this is caught by my email client's junk mail filtering, but some gets through. Most of it is, at face value, auto generated; phishing attempts for bank accounts I don't have or solicitations for advance fee fraud.

But there's also been a recent spike in people wanting me to embed infographics or links into one of my sites that the sender thinks my readers might like. Most of these are so off target as to be ignored, but sometimes there's a mail that seems to have come from a human and might even be relevant to what I write about, but that just fails on so many levels. This is one such email, redacted to save the originating sender and company from any embarrassment.

Subject: Question about garygale.com

Hello,

I was wondering if it would be possible to suggest a link for your website at;

https://www.garygale.com/

Our site [name redacted] ([URL redacted]) is a road travel reporting website, that provides our users with the most up-to-date road traffic information. Our data is updated every 5 minutes using sensors placed on motorways and common A / B roads.

I feel it might be a useful resource for your readers.

Many thanks for your consideration.

Kind Regards, [name redacted]

[name redacted] [email address redacted] [URL redacted]

The email looks like it's been written by a human and it's even grammatically correct and without the usual spelling howlers that characterise spam emails. But deconstruct the email and you can start to see how it just won't achieve its purpose.

Hello,

Hello to you too. I do have a name. It's Gary. It's the name in the email address you've just sent this to and it's also the name in the domain name and in the text of the site you're recommending I put your service's link on. So why not use my name? No matter, let's move on.

I was wondering if it would be possible to suggest a link for your website at; https://www.garygale.com/

This is definitely one of my sites; so suggest away.

Our site [name redacted] ([URL redacted]) is a road travel reporting website, that provides our users with the most up-to-date road traffic information. Our data is updated every 5 minutes using sensors placed on motorways and common A / B roads.

Now the fun starts. The site at www.garygale.com is a personal vanity page; it contains information about me and links to other stuff about me, such as this blog, my Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn profiles. There's not a single link on the site that isn't either directly about me and maintained by me or that I haven't had a personal involvement in. Why would I put a link to a product or service on this site? If anything, this blog might be a better target.

But even then, I might write about things I find interesting, which are usually geographical or map related, but I've never once, as far as I know, written about road traffic data or services.

So I go and look at the site I'm being recommended to link to. It's got a map on it and it looks like it does what it says ... provides live road traffic information in the UK. It links to the UK Highways Agency, which gives it a sheen of authenticity.

There's a Twitter account too. It only has 4 Tweets and two of those are saying the service is down.

But the rest of the website is covered with links to online betting sites, euphemistically referred to as gaming sites as well as car insurance reselling sites. This is looking less and less like something I'd want to be associated with.

I feel it might be a useful resource for your readers.

Why? I've never written about road traffic data. If my readers want to gamble online, surely they can find sites which offer this? Why not a single reason as to why this might be a useful resource?

The simple answer is that this isn't a useful resource. The spam email looks authentic but even if there is a real human behind this, then they haven't even bothered to see whether what is being promoted is a good fit with what I write about or whether it's relevant or not.

Many thanks for your consideration.

Congratulations are in order. You've piqued my attention for about 2 minutes, but then, as is the fate of spam messages, I moved the mouse pointer to the button Mark Selected Message As Junk and just ... clicked.

Photo Credits: AJ Cann on Flickr.