My Love Note From A Spammer

I really do like to help people. I'm a firm believer that you get what you want by helping others get what they want first. I'm not sure who talked about that principle. Was it Zig Ziglar?

Anyway, I received an email today that was clearly spam. I knew right away when I saw the subject line. It read "Simple Way to 'Hack' Your Fat Away." Well, I don't subscribe to any weight loss newsletters, so it was easy to spot.

Normally I just delete these type of emails when I get them, but I had a little extra time today so I decided to play along. Sure enough, this person was mass emailing people using a regular email account. What's worse, he didn't even bother to try and hide his identity by using a fake name and a free email account. Nope, he sent it right out from his domain email.

The body of the email was the usual BS. "Buy this weight loss product because it'll burn fat and this and that and you can lose 480 pounds in 16.35 days, etc, etc, etc." Then he went and put Clickbank links that contained his user ID. Didn't even bother to cloak the links.

Like I said, I usually just delete these. I don't even send them to spam most of the time. For some strange reason, I took pity on the guy. Maybe it's because he broke every single rule in the CAN-SPAM Act, or maybe it's because I figured he was just a really green newb who didn't know any better.

I took almost 30 minutes to write him a detailed email warning of the danger of his actions and then I proceeded to try and help him by teaching him a little about permission based email marketing and what autoresponders do and how he could get started with one and stop putting his entire financial future on the line by by mass emailing people from his own domain email account and using his real name and Clickbank ID. I even made sure I came across as someone who was offering help and trying to teach, not as someone who just trying to bash and berate him.

Now, it's not like I did it because I was expecting a reward. I didn't even expect the guy to write back and thank me. I wasn't doing it for any of those reasons. I was doing it because I genuinely wanted to help a fellow marketer get on the right track and maybe start doing business properly.

Well, about 20 minutes later I got an email back from him. I expected he might want to thank me. Instead, this is what I got:

I guess it's true what they say. No good deed goes unpunished. Your welcome bud.