

Ask HN: What's the purpose of this type of mailform spam? - ereckers

So I recently changed up my mailform handling for my website and I'm now noticing a steady stream of incredibly detailed and well formed mailform spam. A good one just came in that looks like this:<p><pre><code>  ==============================
  Name:  Lilla Dobbs
  Email: AmandaLanesh0@yahoo.com
  Phone: 06-91009165

  Comment:

  My partner and I absolutely love your blog and find the
  majority of your post's to be what precisely I'm looking
  for. can you offer guest writers to write content to suit
  your needs? I wouldn't mind publishing a post or
  elaborating on many of the subjects you write concerning 
  here. Again, awesome web site!
  ==============================
</code></pre>
* I've changed last name slightly (which still wouldn't match the name of the email) and the domain of the email address in case of the incredibly unlikely event that this email isn't spam.<p>So, the submits come from an IP, and a seemingly legitimate User Agent:<p><pre><code>  ==============================
  IP: 5.135.35.83
  User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0) 
  AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/13.0.782.112
  Safari/535.1
  ==============================
</code></pre>
I guess the question is: what's the end-game here? Are they expecting a reply to the email address and then things kick off from there? Is this seeding to get through a couple legitimate emails to start conditioning spam detection algorithms?<p>These emails don't contain the most basic of spammy info:<p><pre><code>  1. no obvious keywords
  2. no urls
  3. no selling of a scam
</code></pre>
It just really seems to me that it's crafted to get a reply. I just don't know why. There is obviously a purpose to this relatively new breed of spam (at least to my eyes), and I'd really be interested to know if anyone has the answer.<p>For some breadth on the messages, here's a sampling of others:<p><pre><code>  ==============================
  Hello there! This is my first visit to your blog! We are a 
  team of volunteers and starting a new project in a 
  community in the same niche. Your blog provided us 
  valuable information to work on. You have done a 
  wonderful job!
  ==============================
  Superb post however I was wondering if you could write a 
  litte more on this topic? I'd be very thankful if you 
  could elaborate a little bit further. Cheers!
  ==============================
  Awesome issues here. I am very satisfied to look your
  article. Thank you a lot and I am taking a look forward 
  to contact you. Will you kindly drop me a e-mail?
  ==============================</code></pre>
======
duncan_bayne
A guess: they want you to let them contribute 'content' on your blog, which
will in turn link to their payload (scam, malware, whatever).

~~~
ereckers
I was wondering that too, but I was thinking that at some point that would
take human interation:

    
    
      1. i reply back and say thank you
      2. they register for an account
      3. i approve them and then they start spamming
    

Maybe a Mechanical Turk type thing?

------
lifeguard
May it is a SEM gimmick? Get you to link to them?

~~~
ereckers
That's probably it and is in line with good old fashioned comment spam. I'm
just not collecting a URL, so I'm not seeing them come through. I might just
add one, hide it from my users and see how many of these comments come through
accompanied with a URL.

Without seeing the URL to tip it off as comment spam I may have just been
overthinking it.

