I was checking my email this morning and I recieved an email through my contact form on Skyefairy, inviting me to be an advertising affiliate or re-seller for the Ectaco JetBook. The immediate word that popped into my head: SPAM. However, I then re-noticed that it came through my contact form, which has anti-robot protection. Basically, the sender was not a bot. More things to proove this are the facts that everything was filled out correctly in Name, Email, and Subject. Before I had the bot protection, when I got spam, they never were. The only thing wrong was that the addressed the email “Dear Sirs” both wrong in gender and plurality.

So, I did some research. This product is real. It is an e-book reader that is a competitor of the Amazon Kindle. The company Ectaco is based in New York City and the email is supposedly from Ann Smith (generic name, eh), the Internet Group Account Executive based in NYC.

So, I did more research. I googled the IP address that the contact form logged. Nothing of interest showed. So I checked my tracker to see if that IP showed up. It did, making 4 repeat visits today between 5am and 6am. NYC is the same timezone as I am, so my next question was: who in their right mind would already be at work that early in the morning? So I scrolled down to see where the IP connects to based on country: Russia. Hmm. Ann Smith from NYC sending an email to me at 5am from Russia..? Doesn’t add up.

But that still leaves the unanswered question: Why are they sending these emails out by hand and not by robot?

And is it really Ectaco or some other spammer (the links sent were accurate as if directly from the company)? Is Ectaco doing THAT bad against Amazon?