Moral: if you want me to link to you, don’t use spammer tactics.
Story: I saw some mail today from someone purporting to represent an outfit called Victor House Publications. That mail looked something like this:

From: “Name Withheld” <research@deleted>

Subject: Your current link to Snpp.com and a link to our site featuring new
images licensed from The Simpsons

To: “registrant” <registrant@FP>

Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 16:06:14 -0400

Dear registrant@FP,

Please don’t delete this! I am a real person contacting you at the address specified on your web site!

I visited your site as part of my research and discovered you have a site link to Snpp.com.

As licensees of The Simpsons, I am respectfully writing to ask you to link to our site, at www.deleted, as well.

It shows our new line of The Simpsons safety products featuring Homer and many of the other characters. We are very proud of the quality of these products and the fact that the posters are original and unique to us!

There was so much interest at our recent product launch I thought I would look for sites about The Simpsons like yours and make this link request. As your site is part of the community of sites that cater to the fans of The Simpsons, we would appreciate your link to us. Such a link would enable your users to see the new posters and images as they are released over the next twelve months and give them an opportunity to provide feedback and ideas.

Any link on your site to our home page at www.deleted similar to the one you have to Snpp.com would be really appreciated.

Thank you again for considering the link.

Kindest regards,

Name Withheld
Senior Researcher
Victor House Publications
research@deleted

2815 Pine Ave. Suite 6 Niagara Falls NY 14301
2085 Hurontario St. Suite 208 Mississauga Ontario L5A 4G1

To stop receiving emails from me, please return this message with the word “Remove” in the title. Sorry to bother you and thanks!

So I was a little torn: their products do look like the kind of thing that our readers might enjoy—though I personally prefer non-novelty safety signs in the home—but the mail was not sent to an address that’s visible anywhere on this site. It was sent to an address that has never intentionally been published anywhere, the address the domain owner’s friends use. Unfortunately, it got published by the .org über-registrar as the "Registrant" address in the domain’s whois info (the naïveté of the domain owner way back when the domain was registered is charmingly appalling). I am shocked—shocked, I tell you—to learn that this whois info is being harvested to generate spam lists, so the address in question has had to be protected with extensive whitelisting (which is why the mail, though sent on Thursday, did not come to my attention till today). So, because the petitioner used an address she had no business using (especially when there’s a perfectly usable mailto link on every one of my posts), I will not link to her site, though neither have I made it very difficult to find the site (just as I haven’t made it all that difficult for you to send more spam to the domain owner).