Humility in spam

Concluding this three-part series on drawing lessons from scummy internet baiting, we have a tactic I just culled from the end of a bit of comment spam:

(Please feel free to delete this post if you don't want it on your blog. Thanks for the informative blog and opportunity to post.)

I should feel free to delete it? Wow, I think I just might take you up on that incredibly generous offer.

What do you even file this under? Spamming them with kindness? Correctly predicting that people who read it will instantly be filled with a desire to delete it, cheekily granting a permission that isn't theirs to grant?

Perhaps superficial humility, appearing humble simply to throw people off with the unexpected attitude, mixed with the psych! of saying that you can go ahead and do what you were going to do anyway. If in marketing you don't want people getting defensive, in spam you often don't want people getting offensive when they're able to delete your message.

Interestingly, this demonstrates that the technique of killing them with kindness—commonly presumed to be invariably angelic—is readily adopted by spammer scum.

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