Copywriter for MT.Net?

Like a few others, I got an intriguing email from “someone” claiming to offer copywriting for my blog:

From: “Imogen Reed” imogen@linegray.com
To: blah blah blah at gmail.com
Subject: Professional Copywriting for Mark Turner Dot Net
Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2012 04:34:56

Howdy J. Mark,

I hope you had a great weekend. I’m just getting in touch to ask if you’re in need of any freelance writing at Mark Turner Dot Net – if so, it’d be an honor to help out and I would love to get involved if you have any need for me.

I’m 29, newly located to London and have been working full-time as a professional writer and researcher for five years now; in that time there isn’t a lot I haven’t already covered (there are a few samples below for you to check out). Anything I send over would be written with the site’s readership in mind – as long as you’re happy with the resulting material, you’d be welcome to publish it as you see fit and the content will be owned by you entirely (in that I won’t send it to anyone else, either before or after publication).

The good news is that I’d be able to offer my services at no charge; the only thing I would ask in return is that I’m able to include a link to a site within the article – nothing shady or unethical, just one of the professional businesses I freelance on behalf of. Otherwise I’d be happy to chat about alternative arrangements.

Do let me know if you’re interested, and if so I can get something written for you over the course of the next few days. Needless to say, the offer is open to any other sites you might own as well as markturner.net. I appreciate that this kind of offer is not for everyone however, so if I don’t hear from you, no offense taken and I won’t trouble you again.

Very best,
Imogen

Of course it’s a scam of some sort. Why would I want anyone else writing my blog? Why do you think I call it “Mark Turner Dot Net?”

I find it interesting that the scammer/bot called me “J. Mark.” I assume that comes either from parsing my online resume or my WHOIS record. In this regard it’s very similar to the mystery email I got a week or so ago. Both seem to be efforts to better defeat the (admittedly relatively simple) efforts to cloak email addresses from email-harvesting spambots.