Delegated Spam
Pardon my ignorance on internet marketing techniques, but I just found the idea of telling someone “I won’t spam you” but letting someone else do it amusing.
See, I downloaded a mini ebook about blogging from a reputable (actually, more than just reputable… some people even call this blogger “A-list”) source and actually believed the “Give me your email address, and be assured that I won’t spam you” clause.
Ok, so I am gulliver. Moving on…
So first I come upon he splash page of how I will be liberated from my ignorance and finally be able to blog like a pro. By the end of the diatribe, I was actually kinda excited to view the promised e-book.
Then I was brought to a page where I am just a few steps away from the promised manna from heaven and then he said the magic words, “but first I need you to do something for me….”
Aha! I knew it, I said to myself, he’s gonna spam me! But no, the request was ‘please subscribe to the following resources’.
And because I was so lusting after the golden information buried within his ebook, subscribe I did… while mentally enabling all the spam filters in my mailbox.
After the subscriptions, the spam came, approximately 5 mails worth. A little over half an hour after that, the ebook arrived. Perhaps the delay was hoping that I’d read the mail that his soldiers of spam sent me during the time that I was waiting for the actual ebook. Again, I was very much tickled at the first lines of his mail:
“… because I value your time and mine, I will not make you wait any longer. Here is my ebook…”
The ebook’s content was actually good (the author being an A-list and all), and I enjoyed reading it; much more so than I enjoyed marking all the incoming spam on my mailbox. The only trouble I had was that, even if I’ve previously marked one mail address as spam, another one comes (with the same message) and manages to dodge my spam filter.
I considered sending a message to the blogger but later on considered that move as stupid. After all, he didn’t spam me, his affiliate dogs did.
As to who he is? Well, we’ve already established that I’m gulliver. And, now you can add the p*ssy and chicken sh*t phrases to that because I’m not telling. :D
