Having had the same email address since sometime in 1996, and being a#

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 20:09:37 +0000

Having had the same email address since sometime in 1996, and being a fairly frequent poster on usenet, I get a lot of spam. Enough in fact, that I can delete it by hand faster and more accurately than spamassassin can, even just looking at the subject/sender name. (Yes, that's right, I got annoyed with my spam filters and turned them off again)

Anyway, I thought this one was funny:

Envelope-to: webmastertelent.net
Subject: telent.net
To: webmastertelent.net
From: Leslie Oneal<leslieoneal@link-builder.com>
I am contacting you about cross linking. I am interested in telent.net because
+it looks like it's relevant to a site that I am the link manager for. The site
+is about search engine optimization research and technology for top search
+engine placement.
I keep the web address confidential and will send it to you only if you give me 
+permission to do so. Just let me know if it's OK, and I'll send you the web   
+address for your review. If you approve of the site, then we'll exchange links.
[---]

Now, I'm no more of an expert in "search engine optimization" than the next man, tending to believe that you can get some pretty good rankings on search engines simply by providing useful or interesting content that people want to link to, but even I know that omitting to tell people the address of your site is not the best way to increase traffic to it.

So I guess the question is: exactly how gullible does one have to be to fall for this rubbish?