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I get emails like this all the time:

Hello dear,

I’m a long time reader. I’m writing to you because I’d love to contribute a guest post on your website.

I’ve been brainstorming some topics that I think your readers would get a ton of value from:

[The Best XXXL Extra Large Electric Heating Pad on Amazon for Full Body]

I’ll make sure the piece overflows with information that can’t be found anywhere else. Looking forward to your reply.

Have a nice day,

Lekin

It's from an ordinary looking hotmail account, and AFAICT contains just this text. There are no links to click, so it's not an ordinary phishing email.

If they really thought I'd like to include their content on my blog, if I had one, surely they know a spammy Amazon product name would be a turnoff.

So it feels like there's some other agenda here, but I can't figure out what it would be.

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  • It's a scam. Once you answer then depending on the particular strain they'll eventually suggest you give them money for something-or-other.
    – simon at rcl
    Sep 12, 2019 at 14:27
  • popehat.com/2015/09/04/in-re-writ-of-pony here's how one large-audience blog handles it (popehat has a pretend horror of ponies which is a bit of a running joke).
    – simon at rcl
    Sep 12, 2019 at 14:32
  • @simonatrcl: But if you didn't have a blog, you wouldn't be interested, and could anyone with a blog, i.e. someone with some minimal level of technical competence, fall for this? I would think that the target demographic of this email is even less likely to fall for it than the usual recipient of spam.
    – Joshua Frank
    Sep 12, 2019 at 15:32
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    Some scammers are clever and some aren't. Who knows? Maybe Lekin hopes you'll start one and buy loads of lovely content from them. Why do scammers send me emails saying they've taken over my machine & used my webcam to film me watching porn? My porn-watching machine doesn't have a web cam, don't they know that?
    – simon at rcl
    Sep 12, 2019 at 16:18
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    They would have to be very curious indeed and strangely immune to the vastly more interesting aviation and world building hot network questions three inches to the right.
    – Joshua Frank
    Sep 12, 2019 at 19:38

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So it feels like there's some other agenda here, but I can't figure out what it would be.

Nope, it's exactly what it looks like. It's marginally-targeted spam. The sender is a scummy SEO marketer, and is hoping that you will allow them to write a (garbage) "blog post" for your site, filled with backlinks to their content.

If they really thought I'd like to include their content on my blog, if I had one, surely they know a spammy Amazon product name would be a turnoff.

The sender is just really, really bad at making their emails sound convincing. I've seen much better written attempts than this.

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