Sometimes, I really can't work out what spammers are after. A list I'm on was vigourously bombarded - about 50 copies got through before an admin got on the case - with a listing of reg codes for Microsoft stuff, up to and including a beta build of Longhorn. I can see why someone might send a single copy, but not 50. And there's no benefit in sight.
And there's a very well written one in this morning to Swiftpay from "Elizabeth Richson", saying that she writes for a website, has linked to us, and would we be interested in linking back to her? Apparently she found us by searching for a given search term, which is one that you'd reasonably find Swiftpay on. If it wasn't for the slightly klunky line of "My site is all about Finance - Misc too", I wouldn't even have glanced at the headers. But it turns out to be from a non-existent domain, and in something mildly mindboggling, googling for that name gives a total of two results, neither connected in any way to finance sites. So a mail asking for a link to a site which doesn't seem to exist, from an email address that can't be replied to, which was generated by a clever program tripped up only by the fact that the category the site is listed under didn't fit as a natural language noun. Why? How can anyone possibly profit by sending this?
And there's a very well written one in this morning to Swiftpay from "Elizabeth Richson", saying that she writes for a website, has linked to us, and would we be interested in linking back to her? Apparently she found us by searching for a given search term, which is one that you'd reasonably find Swiftpay on. If it wasn't for the slightly klunky line of "My site is all about Finance - Misc too", I wouldn't even have glanced at the headers. But it turns out to be from a non-existent domain, and in something mildly mindboggling, googling for that name gives a total of two results, neither connected in any way to finance sites. So a mail asking for a link to a site which doesn't seem to exist, from an email address that can't be replied to, which was generated by a clever program tripped up only by the fact that the category the site is listed under didn't fit as a natural language noun. Why? How can anyone possibly profit by sending this?