“Hello, Fellow Bloglines user … has recommended the following blogs. You can choose to add some or all of these blogs to your Bloglines account“

Does this email look like spam to you? It certainly does to me. Oh, well, let’s quickly check my Bloglines profile to turn recommendations off… oops.. I can’t. This is definitely SPAM.

In my two years of using Bloglines I’ve never seen this before. In fact all I have there is a dormant account that I haven’t logged into for a long time – so I certainly could not have opted in to this program. I guess Bloglines “volunteered me”.

Is Bloglines so fed up losing market share to Google Reader that they think spamming will win users back? This can only backfire – btw, Gmail’s spam filter is pretty good, so this is the last junk mail I received from Bloglines. But so far I haven’t activeley disliked Bloglines – now I do. Not a good deal for Bloglines, if you ask me.

Oh, and while I’m at it: all those Plaxo Pulse invitations from unknown people are also spam. They just don’t learn.

Update (11/18): It’s worse than I thought: I received the same spam to another email account which Bloglines should not even be aware of – not unless they deep scan old blog posts for buried mailto links.

Update (12/4): Tom Raftery is also fed up with Plaxo spam.