I received a curious e-mail the other day:

Subject: Interested in purchasing textlink Hey I visited your site and contents of your site http://geekblog.oakcircle.com/ got my attention. I am interested in purchasing Text links advertisement on it. If you are interested please inform me. I can make an attractive offer. Thanks, [Name removed]

I’ve made something of a study of mass-generated messages, and this has all the hallmarks of one. It’s very generic… there’s no information about what she found “interesting” on the site, or about the “attractive offer,” or what she wants to advertise. The only identifying information at all is the URL, which was pretty obviously pasted in by an automated system. It was sent to the e-mail address that the site registrar has on file, which I deliberately don’t use for anything else, and the from-address is a free and anonymous GMail account. There are indications in the grammar and vocabulary that it was either written carelessly or by a non-native-English-speaker — not necessarily a problem, but it shares that trait with most spam and scam messages I see.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious. If it’s legitimate, what would a potential advertiser possibly find useful about a blog on such wide-ranging and rarely-connected topics? If (as is more likely) it’s not, what kind of scam is this person trying to pull? But I’m not curious enough to contact her to find out — if, indeed, it really is a “her.”

Besides which, I think I have a pretty good idea already. The two most likely are that it’s simply designed to get verification of active e-mail addresses for spamming purposes, or that the proposed “textlink” could go to a site that attempts to infect visitors with Trojan horse programs. Thanks, but I’m not interested in helping with either of those.