Legitemate Comment or Weird Spam?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I get spam on my blog. Nothing new – every blog gets comment spam. That’s why The Great and Powerful Og developed Akismet. But one or two get past the filters every once in a while, and they’re usually easy to spot – mostly because they’re selling something, so a quick click on the “spam” button adds it to the filters. (We validate comments manually before they’re posted publicly, so no one ever sees the spam unless it’s someone who has an account and is logged in – in which case we can just ban them.)

But this one … I’m not sure what to make of it. I’m heavily leaning towards spam, but…

So I’m playing a little pro/con here:

PRO:

  • It speaks specifically about the site, so it’s referencing the right medium.
  • We’re a tech blog focusing on Apple’s OSX-based portables (iPhone, Touch), and we do talk to developers and people in the scene, so, yeah, it’s possible someone might want some exposure on our blog.
  • It’s spelled correctly, even if the “I got” makes me cringe.
  • The name entered and the signature match. While this is hardly conclusive of anything, it’s organized enough that this isn’t your average sloppy spam.

CON:

  • Who the hell are you that you have clients asking you to ask me for exposure? Why don’t they just ask me themselves?
  • You didn’t leave an E-Mail address. That’s probably not very conducive to me contacting you.
  • Why did you ask in the comments instead of E-Mailing me directly? We do have a nice “contact us” button along the top, you know.
  • Very vague. While I can understand not wanting to divulge too much in a public comment, a little more description is in order, I think.

Sounds a lot like spam or phishing, right? But why not leave an E-mail address? It’s not a very effective phishing expedition if you brought the bait but not the hook.

I may just delete it anyway – the whole “client” business is fishy. If someone wants some exposure on my site they can contact me directly.

EDIT: Oh, he did leave an E-Mail address. I’ll be damned. It was tucked away in the private stuff only admins can see. It’s a Gmail address.

Think I should E-Mail him and find out? Or just delete it? Anyone with a blog gotten anything like this?

2

I vote spam, for the reasons you yourself wrote. Do some googling on the email address, also copy & paste some of his text, putting it in google with double quotes around it. I’ll bet something will turn up.

3

I got that same e-mail the other day, and I don’t HAVE a web site. It’s spam.

4

It’s spam. I found eight Google hits for a partial quote of that post, all from “William Tunstall.”

Here’s one.

5

Well, Googling the bait line, “I got a client
that wants some exposure on your site” turns up the same message left in the comments of a few other blogs – all of them tech related. One of them is aimed at the PS3 though, which is a case of “one of these things is not like the other.”

Googling his name in quotes with the keywords “client exposure” outside the quotes yields more results the line above didn’t catch, so yeah. I think I’m going to err on the side of spam here.

6

Set up a disposable email account and respond.

I’m leaning towards spam, but it’s easy enough to find out for sure.

7

I assure you, something that appears in that many blogs with identical wording is spam.