Tag: spam

Recruiter fails

The responses are my personal impressions, communicated to my Microsoft recruiter in the context of a private 1:1 conversation. A few days after I sent my response to the recruiter, I saw an anonymized version floating around and being discussed inside Microsoft. I hadn’t realized at the time that I wrote it that it would be distributed widely within Microsoft so that was a bit of a shock.

sour grapes shared with recruiter -> pwnage
2013-11-18: an acquaintance got the following recruiter spam. with skills like that, no wonder most people can be replaced with a markov chain.

How are you doing today!! Here’s the Contractual Direct Client Requirement for you. Hope you’ll go through this and revert back to me! Looking forward.. It would be very great help for me to fill this position by referring your friends and colleagues who might be interested on this opportunity.

Keep your eyes open for a special blessing from God today

Finance Spam

On April 14, 2007, I signed up for an AmeriTrade account using an e-mail address consisting of 16 random alphanumeric characters, which I never gave to anyone else. On May 15, I started receiving pump-and-dump stock spams sent to that email address. I was hardly the first person to discover that this happens. Almost all of the top hits in a Google search for “ameritrade spam” are from people with the same story: they used a unique address for each service that they sign up with, so they could tell if any company ever leaked their address to a spammer, and the address they gave to AmeriTrade started getting stock spam.”

ameritrade has an insider selling email addresses. they need a SOX audit

Dear No First Name

A PR firm wrote us a letter to win our business. It was signed by their Director of Business Development. The letter detailed the awards they’ve won, the placements they’ve achieved for their clients, and the number of clients they’ve had that have been acquired or gone public. It sounds impressive, but it all started with “Dear .” Whoops!

junk mail is dead

Google Pay Per Action

Affiliate marketing networks like Commission Junction and LinkShare are screwed. These networks also operate on a cost-per-action basis, mostly with online retailers. Even though some of them have scale, they will not have the ability to compete with Google on sheer size of network. Advertisers flock to volume, which drives average pricing up. When prices increase, publishers flock to the new platform because they’ll earn more. Look for serious publisher leakage from the big affiliate networks over time as this new product scales up. If you want to argue this point, note what happened to the stock price of Commission Junction’s parent company, ValueClick, today. And that’s even though the market has largely adjusted for this news already – this move to add PPA ads has been rumored for some time.

good riddance to affiliate spam, hopefully

Google Maps Sydney Flyover

We had some very intense days of planning before finally deciding that Michael and Jodie would fly down from Brisbane to meet Mike and together we would make a giant eye to look back up at the plane and show the world that Swift City ‘has its eye on the world’. Ok, so that last bit is a bit corny.

stupid spammers

“Undetectable” spam

His old system was undetectable, but he was worried he might be caught, so he was working on a spiffy new scheme which was really really undetectable. But only 99% bulletproof. As you might be able to guess, I was easily able to find all of the fellow’s “undetectable” doorway pages and all of his clients with a single Google query — I didn’t even have to use any of my internal tools. I still chuckle when I hear the word “undetectable.”

where the average IQ of a SEO is revealed