A New Category of Spam

I got an e-mail this morning asking for "a cost to place this ad below in you paper and online in employment dept. i need cost for 9 weeks." From the shaky grammar and capitalization, I suspect it's from a bot and thus spam. It then list an ad that I should run in my paper -- I was momentarily tempted to claim that I'd done so and send an invoice for several thousand dollars.

I'm not entirely sure what the point of this message is, though -- perhaps it's just meant as a test to see if the e-mail address is valid. (If someone replies "I'm not a newspaper, you dummy," it means there's a person there.) If that's true, then this is from the subcategory of spam that only exists to pave the way for more spam.

And, of course, is the spam-meisters could be that inventive about something constructive, we wouldn't be in a massive world-wide recession right now.