On my personal blog, I received an email through a contact form, which until recently, had a “captcha” image that I could never read. Now that this security feature has been removed, I received a contact message from someone looking to buy a text link advertisement on my site. Seeing as I do not have any other advertising on the site, I thought the request was a little peculiar, but not out of the realm of possibility. My contact form also sends an automated, yet personal message to anyone who completes the form, and I received a friendly response email that made the person seem legit.

But when I went to search on the person’s name, I came up with several search results that indicate the person is a spammer, in fact, not even real. Blog authors argue that she is most likely a smart robot submitting spam comments both through posts and through contact forms, and one commenter even indicated that their email address had been collected from an image, not from a text scraper

Could this email be from a legitimate person who now has a reputation management problem, or a spam robot? I am reserving judgment for now.

This is a public service announcement to check out even legitimate looking emails by searching on the sender’s name for relevant information before responding.

Filed under: Reputation Management on Friday, January 25th, 2008 by Jacob Wolfsheimer |
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