I received two emails from “Emily Smithson” alerting me to broken links on a webpage I maintain. She recommended a website which has “mirrored” the original content as a place to link to.

How helpful, I thought, reading the first email. But then I saw that the 2nd email had the exact same format, almost as if it was sent out automatically by a spam bot.

A quick google search shows that E.S. has been finding other broken links and recommending people fix them with links to “http://www.aprendelo.com”.

Perhaps she is just a helpful individual who sends out emails with the exact same format to multiple people, and happens to find a mirror of the content that they had previously linked to all on the same “http://www.aprendelo.com” website. Or perhaps the website deliberately mirrors other people’s content and then tries to get people to link to it for profit.

In any case, I appreciated the notice that the link was not working, but I updated the link to point at the new official source of the content, not the website her email recommended.