This is new…. providing useful information in spam. I just got an email with the following:
Subject: Broken link in www.arcterex.net
There appears to be a problem on this page of your site.
On page http://www.arcterex.net/news-to-98.html
when you click on “me”,
the link to http://www.arcterex.net/alan@northco.net
gives the error: Not found.
Suggestion: You may have forgotten the “mailto:”
As recommended by the Robot Guidelines, this email is to explain our robot’s activities and to let you know about one of the broken links we encountered. [product that I shall not name] does not store or publish the content of your pages, but rather uses the link information to update our map of the World Wide Web.
Are these reports helpful? I’d love some feedback. If you prefer not to receive these occasional error notices please let me know.
So it’s obviously spam for a link checking product of some sort, but it’s providing actual useful (kinda) information. Assuming anyone is going to click on a link in a very old page that goes to a very old email address of course. I’m a little torn as this is a new tactic, and I do appreciate being told about broken links… sadly though, I can’t say for sure that it’s not “true” spam, or someone looking for valid emails. It is probably a “valid” marketting attempt to show that they have a useful product and are showing you that and selling a service. No apparent forged email headers, but it does have some email headers that make it look like it’s tracking something (ID, SID, UID, etc). Still, unsolicited email these days goes straight to the bit bucket.