Spam emails are certainly getting more selective.

The email harvesting robots which trawl the web are now (on a strangely positive side) aligning harvested email addresses and targeting them at specific groups (ie email addresses that have not been opted in, but just collected in plain text from different websites it finds).

I’m sure my email address has now just been ‘sold’ (for a very small price no doubt), to lists claiming I’ve been opted in.

One of the hidden email addresses on the Parlour Design website (one that a typical human browser would have no reason to find), has just been invited to the ‘Annual Design Awards’, whereby for a fee, we can enter into a competition and submit our best design.

Using their special promotional code sent via email, we can also get a discount!

So if we were genuinely being invited by a human, they would have used one of the publicised email addresses on the main website.

Similarly, my belief is that if this was a genuine industry award, we wouldn’t pay to enter, but that the cost of looking through my entry would be covered by their advertising and sponsorship of the event.

I will of course be keeping clear of it.

That particular email address has now been blocked from further spam indefinitely, and the area it was used for, has now been updated to a new email address again.

I wonder how long it’ll be before this new email gets spammed again!