Comments on: Do you get these emails?

By: Mia Malri

Mia Malri — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 14:37:47 +0000

M Cutts is “Matt Cutts”. As far as I know it’s an internet phrase of some sort.

By: Michel Bessette

Michel Bessette — Mon, 25 May 2009 19:45:08 +0000

I get at least 2 requests a week asking me to help some widow or orphan get money out of some exotic country… Is there any way that I can STOP THIS?? What is the danger if I reply and ask politely for them to Pxxx OFF??

Gracias, Michel.

By: justin

justin — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 01:40:14 +0000

I don’t get those but what I do get, every single day, is a request from (random website) asking to purchase a (permanent) “text” link in my website, or on a certain page on my website. They always start with something along the lines of “great site..” (the compliment) and proceed to either beg or, more over the last year, simply bribe their way to a link. They are generated form letters that probably only see a human eye if I were to reply.

Obviously whatever google does to protect page rank from being sold in the open market isn’t working. If I was unscrupulous I could have made thousands from selling these links.

By: ren

ren — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:50:55 +0000

Never had this kind of email. My guess is that they bait you with some academic exposure and at some point will ask for money to “get your work published”. Hate these scammers.

By: Heidi Cool

Heidi Cool — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 03:19:47 +0000

I’ve gotten several of these, not necessarily regarding mathematics but on a variety of academic topics. I used to design for a university so I assumed they were grabbing my .edu address from pages I’d worked on there.

By: Celestial

Celestial — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:09:39 +0000

I read a news about terrorists sending coded messages to their group and spam such mails so that their mails r not easily tracked. It COULD be one of such mails or may be not.

You can read the news here;
http://in.news.yahoo.com/20/20090206/1416/tnl-the-spam-mail-in-your-inbox-could-be.html

By: R. Janio

R. Janio — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 08:33:08 +0000

Thats is the price tobe so fammous, Mister Matt Cutts, you will be remembered for ever. So many peoples wold like to be in your jobs, you are the guy.
Dont worry Mister cutts, dont worry

By: NeuroToxic

NeuroToxic — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 04:39:35 +0000

Sending spam emails to the head of Google’s webspam team, how dumb some people are, so do you pass these onto the Gmail team for future flagging as pre identified spam?

Speaking of spam and Gmail, why can’t we have a flag and ignore option? Don’t get me wrong the Gmail spam filter works well, but it would be nice to be able to completely ignore some persistent spammers so they don’t even make it back into the spam folder.

By: EGOL

EGOL — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:31:40 +0000

I also get these… they are looking for free content, maybe you will be asked to pay…

… but Matt, you will get more of these than I will because you are widely known and an article from you will pump up the credibility of their little vanity press.

And, for a few more bucks they will toss in a PhD sheepskin.

By: Corrado

Corrado — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 20:06:46 +0000

I do get a lot of those things. What they do is fetching the email address of authors from good journals and/or conference proceedings and solicit paper submissions.

I don’t think it’s a scam: it’s just an editor trying to launch yet another technical/scientific journal and needs reasonably good submission. Needless to say, you’d be wasting your time sending anything over, as you get more visibility on your blog.

The “conference” equivalent of that email is more annoying: I guess somebody can actually make money by “trowing” a conference after fishing around for free speakers…