I had never heard of Geeklist until last week, when I received an email from them and then read the story about their promotion of “brogramming” and abusive response to being called out for it.
The email came first – and as I had never head of them this –
Hi, my name is Jenny and I work for Geeklist, sorry to bug in advance! I noticed you have your email listed on github, so I wanted to reach out and send you a quick note (only this once and never again I promise!). We recently added integration with Github‘s API and wanted to see if you are interested in testing it out and give us feedback, perhaps you can add Groovy-Life or valext?
I realize this comes out of nowhere, but this might be interesting way to connect with other awesome geeks too (mabye), would love to hear feedback in general on that as well. We have a ton of geeks in our system already ranging from Matz the creator of Ruby http://geekli.st/matzand awesome geeks building great products http://geekli.st/dtrinh/i-helped-build-path-2
If you are cool with this and want to check it out go to: http://geekli.st/invite/********** and use this code: ******
We are only sending this to a few people, so let me know if you wish to invite others! thank you so much and sorry to bug you!
– made me think they were a genuine community effort. I made a note to have another look.
But having read about their attitude to women that other other look is now a good deal more sceptical – though even I thought it odd they suggested I added a program designed to analyse the XML output of a hardcore debugging tool.
And, of course, the first thing I noticed on a second look was the subject line:
RE: Quick question / your work on Github
As I have never written to Geeklist about anything and had never even heard of them before the email turned up it is obvious that this email was not “RE:” anything. It is spam from some spammers trying to cheat spam filters and will be treated in just the same way as the occasional other bits of spam mail that get through the filter.
I hope others will follow a similar course of action.
I would not have minded if they had actually badged the email as what it really was – as they say my email is on Github and if you consciously post your email it is because you want or expect people to get in touch. But the crude attempts at psychological manipulation – hi my name is jenny – and above all the dishonest subject line mean it is straight to the WPB for them.
Related articles
- My Opinion About The Geeklist Sexism Case (dreamintech.net)
- Geeklist Reminds Us That On Twitter, Everyone Can See You Destroy Your Own Brand (bub.blicio.us)
- Apology from Geeklist (gklst.tumblr.com)
- Geeklist and the Sexy Lady Video: Another Startup Falls Prey to Sexism Charges [VIDEO] (betabeat.com)
- Why are posts about the Geeklist controversy being removed from Hacker News? (untogether.co.uk)
- The Geeklist demo on how to destroy a budding startup brand image in just a few tweets. (adland.tv)
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 
2 responses to “Geeklist spamming people”
Got the exact same spam. And there’s a gist up with it as well. I dropped GH a line. I doubt they’ll be appreciative of someone using their good name in this spam email. Just noticed the sexism connection today. Two solid reasons to have nothing to do with these guys.
I got the same, but turns out the person on the other side is legit, try to email back. Her English is not great though, but she seems nice. They needs help testing their github integration apparently. I registered, but not sure i’m ready to share my projects, they are not that great. They need other login options, like Github.