Structured Thought . ORG

Either that, or the smarter ones have moved on and decided to attempt to make a life for themselves.

On my LockerGnome tech-centric blog, I received the following comment (link removed for obvious reasons):

Author : e-marketing (IP: 125.164.222.118 , 118.subnet125-164-222.speedy.telkom.net.id)
E-mail : mbahgugel@gmail.com
URL : [removed]
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=125.164.222.118
Comment: halowwwwwwwwwwwwww

hmm nice articel bropooo

i have exitingarticel in my site

[url removed]

That’s all. A horrendously spelled, mostly nonsensical attempt to get me to hit what is most likely just a link farm page (with probably more than a couple of malicious links).

Seriously, if you really want someone to look at your crappy spam site, you need to do a lot better than that.

I invite any reader of this site to sign the e-mail address above up for whatever mailing lists you feel are appropriate. Let them learn the ‘power’ of spam.

I sent the following as an e-mail to PC Photo’s subscription department this morning. Please, if you’re a photographer of any type, contact pcphotomag@neodata.com and let them know that this type of advertisement is not tolerated.

I wish to complain about the two solicitations for subscription that I received in my mailbox this week.

They arrived in two envelopes (one accented green for ‘Outdoor Photographer’, and one red for ‘PC Photo’), the only contents of which were a reply envelope and two copies of an invoice-style subscription offer, one to keep, and one to return in the envelope.

I have personally railed against this type of advertising in the past, as it really is the realm of scammers.

While I know, on the surface, companies would never admit to it, I am 100% confident that these types of ads are designed to fool people into believing that they have subscribed to the service/magazine/etc, and simply forgot to pay the bill.

In many cases, the solicitations I received from your company are worse than the many I receive from shady domain-registration companies, in that they have a separate sheet that details the fact that the documents are not actual invoices, where yours simply have it written in one corner unobtrusively.

Let it be said that regardless of the content of any of your magazines, these ads have cemented a resolve to never ever subscribe to your magazines, and I will encourage anyone else I am in contact with that subscribes to cancel their subscription immediately.

It saddens me that so many corporations, particularly in these hard times where some people are attempting just to make it through to the next month, are resorting to effectively scamming people out of money to boost their appearance of sales, and make a buck.

Please remove me from all of your mailing lists for all of your products effective immediately. Additionally, this e-mail address is not to be used for any communication with me other than responses directly related to the content of this message.

My address details:
[[REDACTED]]

P.S. I am also circulating a copy of this e-mail to friends and relatives in order to encourage them to not patronize companies that stoop to this level in order to advertise.

If you have the time, or the means, please spread the word.