How do we define spam?

Posted by stuart as ,

From Wikipedia:

Spam is e-mail that is both unsolicited by the recipient and sent in substantively identical form to many recipients. Thus, a common synonym for spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE).

I received an email this morning from an internet marketer I’d never heard of. The email went something along the lines of:

Hi Stuart

I’m a regular reader of Pimp My Page Rank… keep up the good work!

I thought I’d tell you about an affiliate launch of mine that may be of interest…

Now for all I know this guy might be a regular reader. (If you are, you know who you are, and you’re welcome to leave a comment here identifying yourself.) I can’t seem to find any comments left here using any variation of the name given in the email, and I’ve certainly had no correspondence with this person before.

I went and had a look at the wesite listed in the email, the business basically provides training in internet marketing. It all seems legit enough, and the training looks like it might be interesting if you didn’t have the time to go find the information for yourself for free on the web, but I can’t help feeling that my name’s been harvested and dropped into some sort of email merge package.

Any other readers here get this email, or am I just over-reacting?