One Million Dollars

I posted this screenshot on Facebook today with the caption “Seriously, fuck off.”

And you might be confused. On its face, the email looks innocuous. It’s polite, he calls me by my correct name, it’s concise. It even implies that there is money involved, and I’m always screaming about how I don’t work for free. So why would I give him such a snotty answer?

Here’s the thing. I deal with this kind of email all the freaking time. I get dozens of them a day. This is from someone who wants to post some kind of badly-written spammy bullshit post on my site that’s full of questionable links and stuffed with keywords.

How do I know?

There’s no mention of the product. As if I wouldn’t care at all what I throw up on my site. “Oh, you’re offering me money? Then I don’t care what it is! I’ll post it!!”

Strike one.

He wrote to me from a gmail account. Normally I don’t notice where someone is writing to me from…unless the email looks suspicious. Then I take a look. If this were a quality proposal he would be writing to me from an agency, or from a brand.

Strike two.

He makes no mention of where he got my name and email address from. If we’d had any kind of contact before, he definitely would have mentioned that (we have not – thank you gmail for letting me search every email I’ve sent and received since 2004). If he’d gotten it from someone else I’d worked with before, he’d have mentioned that. If he’d taken a look at my blog, he would have mentioned that.

Strike three.

So he most likely got my name from a list. These lists are sold by people who know nothing about bloggers but who are no doubt making a lot of money selling names and contact information to people who know even less.

My email address is pretty easy to find. I mean, it’s in that picture up there. And it’s on my business cards, which I give out with wild abandon. And it’s on my contact page. If he’d found my email address on my contact page, he also would have seen where I say, very clearly, that I do not accept unsolicited guest posts.

I deal with this kind of thing all the time. It never goes away, it only gets worse. So sometimes I have to have a little fun with it.

Incidentally, he wrote back saying that he didn’t have a million dollars, but could offer me $120 to post his spammy guest article for one year.

I wrote him right back, telling him that he probably got my name off of a list and was wasting my time.

All of this back-and-forth took more time than just deleting his email, but it felt better, too.