Dude, you've got some REAL brass balls.

I was looking through some of my email accounts today, trying to decide which ones need to be abandoned. (Every so often I'll make an email address 'public' for use with a blog or podcast etc. and they're usually at the hundred or so spam emails per day stage within a month or two).

Well, first, apologies to everyone who tried to reach me through some of those addresses and didn't get a reply. (Etcher, I sent you what you needed, only a month late, sorry bout dat).

Anyway, as I was sorting through, I came across an email that I had to read no less that five times, just to convince myself that I hadn't just eaten a ham and mescaline sandwich, rather than ham and cheese.

Here's the deal:

Many moons ago I wrote a post, basically making fun of 'Smilin' Bob' from those 'Male Enhancement' commercials.

Today, I got an email from someone who had spammed that post with a comment that said:

"Hey, great stuff and I love your blog! For more information on male enhancement visit (insert link to bullshit 'herbal viagra' website here)"

Normally, I delete spam comments as soon as I see them, somehow this one had slipped under the radar.

So the guy who spammed me wrote me an email, telling me that the particular website he linked to was no longer up, and would I mind editing his comment to link to a different 'male enhancement' site.

Well, I thought I'd reply to him here, as well as the email I sent him:

Dude,

First and foremost, let me state for the record that you're a complete and utter asshole.

First of all, I worked pretty damn hard to 'establish' this blog and generate a fair amount of traffic. What you're looking at is three years of work and roughly two million words written. That's right, written, not cut and pasted, not stolen from other people, but actual, honest to God original content.

That's obviously a new concept to you. Some people on the internet actually contribute rather than just steal other people's content or sponge off other's popularity.

The fact that you obviously didn't even read the post you commented on shows me that all you're trying to do is exploit my hard work to try and drum up traffic to your bullshit website. Obviously, you just googled 'male enhancement', and left comments with links to your site on every blog you could find.

So I'd appreciate it if you'd explain to me and everyone else why I'd go out of my way to actually help you be the equivalent of a traffic parasite.

Dude, honestly, you're the scum of the internet. You, and people like you, are the reason I have to abandon email addresses within months of making them public. You're the reason it's pretty much impossible to surf the internet and not see pop-ups on every other page.

The fact you thing I'd actually help you do that is laughable.

Oh, and no-one falls for your super-smooth technique of saying how awesome their blog is. When it's painfully obvious that you didn't even skim the post you're commenting on, it doesn't take a huge IQ to realise you're just another asshole.

Yep, I wrote a post about how ridiculously fake those ads are, how those products certainly don't work...but mostly I wrote about how 'Smilin' Bob' pretty much screwed his acting career by appearing in those commercials.

Am I meant to believe you read that and thought that my post would be a great place to advertise the very products I just spent a thousand words ragging on?

Douchebag.

So here's my advice. Get a fucking life, put your hand into your own pocket and buy some publicity, rather than just being a worthless leech.

Go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut.

Paulius.