This chaps my ass

This morning, I received the following email (identifying info redacted; I don’t see any purpose in revealing the sender’s product):

Hi Stan,
Ran across your blog “Agile Testing” while looking for bloggers in the software testing area. I thought I’d tell you about the launch of [redacted]. It’s a flexible [redacted] system that features [redacted]…
For the first time, IT leaders can realize the benefits of [more marketing text redacted]…
[Redacted] provides a simple way for organizations to [redacted]…
We’d love to hear what you think about [redacted] and will be glad to share more information with you, including a demo. A mention in your blog would be great. (emphasis added)

This is actually a type of software that interests me, but what galls me is the intent of this email. The purpose of this email is not to get the word out about this fantastic software to a blogger whose audience might also be interested in it. At best, it’s an attempt to get free publicity, but I rather suspect the actual goal is search engine manipulation: getting a link to their site from a site in order to boost their site’s search engine ranking.
If the marketing drones had made a good faith effort to educate me about their software, I might well have tried it out and posted my (hopefully) review on this blog. With these cheap tactics, however, all they get is my scorn.