I have written before about the spam that daily crams my WordPress spam box, and I continue to be very puzzled by it. At first, these messages seduced me because they  flatter, and one can’t ever have too much flattery. As a new and creatively fragile blogger, I am especially vulnerable to smooth talk (well, really, I’m always vulnerable to it), although the talk isn’t especially smooth given the abundance of grammatical, spelling, and diction errors. 

At first, I couldn’t understand why someone would send spam that contained no obvious come-on, like a link or an ad of some kind. Then, I saw that the e-mail addresses of the senders contained ads for services or products, though it is hard to see the connection between these ads and their companion messages. Although I am relieved to know that there is some method to this madness, I still don’t get how I am being sold to. Is it just that I am supposed to remember, say, the name of some athletic shoes subliminally embedded in an address so that I will go looking for them online? Fat chance.

Although these messages are very annoying, for the most part they appear harmless. Today, however, I received one that was sinister in a messing-with-your-head kind of way. Somehow, it managed to evade Akismet and showed up instead as a seemingly legitimate comment in which I was told the purported reader had tried to go to my home page and was immediately redirected to a comment page.

I was so fuffled by this that I set out to ask WordPress about it, only to find that the company is backed up with messages and has stopped accepting new ones for the time being. I next did a Google search of my blog and its various posts, and nothing seemed awry. I later noticed an ad buried in the e-mail address of this creepy message and have since received more of the same in my spam box.

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