Yesterday’s most puzzling item that turned up on my e-mail Junk site for my moderation (a small but significant amount of stuff is incorrectly labeled as Junk and has to be rescued; the rest I hand-delete):
headers (items with embedded links are underlined):
Outreach Team
Are you accepting paid guest post on arnoldzwicky.org
To: arnoldzwicky.org
Reply-to: Outreach Team
body of text (in its entirety, verbatim):
Hello,
I hope you are doing well.
I’m reaching out to explore the possibility of contributing a guest post to your website, along with a permanent do-follow link.
Could you let me know the available opportunities and relevant details?
I look forward to your response.Best regards,
Thank you!
My first response was astonishment. I get an enormous number of requests to do guest postings on my blog, but most of them have some bit of credibility, and some are very cleverly framed. But this one is essentially a detail-free message. Does anyone ever reply to such messages?
Ah, but then I looked at the links and investigated further.
The links. The main header link Outreach Team is to
sarah.beth@COMPANYNAME.com
(where COMPANYNAME is for a company I’ve never heard of; for your protection, I’m not revealing it here)
The link for my WordPress blog address is to me at my gmail address.
The reply-to link Outreach Team is to
outreach@COMPANYNAME.com
The masque of COMPANYNAME. So what is COMPANYNAME? I am an old fool, but canny enough not to click on the links that COMPANYNAME supplies, since those might be shunted anywhere.
So I instigated a search on COMPANYNAME.com, typing in the link by hand. And triggered this equivalent of flashing red lights and ear-splittng sirens:
This site could be risky
Advanced Security blocked access to
http://COMPANYNAME.com/
This site might compromise your device or contain high-risk content.
To avoid these risks, we recommend avoiding this site.
So the appearance of awkward incompetence at soliciting guest postings is in fact the masque of net evil. It’s a jungle out there.
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