The author of this article came across as a major creep to me. They guy checks emails from 6 months ago and keeps going back to her blog to verify stuff....WTF? I'd be more concerned about this guy than her silly affiliate links.
Yeah, I had to read it a few times to realise it wasn't auto-generated content or some other type of spam. But I think the recipients probably knew the sender.
It's also possible that the spam email came from a computer infected with malware, making the target of this "attack" an innocent bystander.
Whether this was the case, in this instance, is insignificant, it's just one of those things that the author didn't think of, it shows the author did not think very deeply about the situation, and simply wanted to flex his technical jock.
But in retrospect you guess this was spam would have been incorrect. It was a carefully crafted action by a researcher. Maybe their intuition was actually better?
I was a bit shocked when I got to the last line...
"Instead, he blogs about the most interesting ones. Companies embarrassed by having their e-mails posted online can get him to pull the entries from his blog for a small payment."
Interesting point, can we really substantiate that if he originally sent that through e-mail? I could see something in his head clicking that it was bullshit but I see more formal, orchestrated evilness would have constructed this in a formal blogpost.
Latent evilness may have realized that he could use this to generate "crusader" points, but he couldn't have thought this really would have built that much steam.
I always assumed it was some spam bot that had been set up by a moron, could it really be the case that somebody is genuinely writing them out sincerely?
There is no excuse whatsoever for requiring someone clicking a link in an email you sent them, to verify their address with you (by clicking a link you sent them.) OP is right, you're engaged in dark pattern techniques and you know damn well that you're doing it.
OP: don't give him a pass. Sue him under the CAN-SPAM act.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad he confirmed his suspicion before blogging about this. But even one e-mail like that is suspicious.
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