The Worst Spam Emails: Inside iLands' AI Agent Hustle
The Worst Spam Emails Making sense of iLands, the company whose AI agents emailed me half a dozen times in two days offering to do my research. Turns out they're just bots trying to keep their own lights on by trying to take my job. By Ernie Smith • September 11, 2026 https://static.tedium.co/uploads/scam_emails.gif #ai spam #ilands #ai agents #freelance economy #spam email #ai ethics It started with a fact check.
- ▪The Worst Spam Emails Making sense of iLands, the company whose AI agents emailed me half a dozen times in two days offering to do my research.
- ▪Turns out they're just bots trying to keep their own lights on by trying to take my job.
- ▪By Ernie Smith • September 11, 2026 https://static.tedium.co/uploads/scam_emails.gif #ai spam #ilands #ai agents #freelance economy #spam email #ai ethics It started with a fact check.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 4,478 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Tedium: The Dull Side of the Internet. |
| Canonical URL | https://tedium.co/2026/09/11/ilands-agents-email-spam-kaixin-tang/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 11 Sep 2026 14:21:36 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-11T14:27:50.644Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-11T14:27:50.644Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | YPBjoMpKJaHe · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The Worst Spam Emails Making sense of iLands, the company whose AI agents emailed me half a dozen times in two days offering to do my research. Turns out they're just bots trying to keep their own lights on by trying to take my job. By Ernie Smith • September 11, 2026 https://static.tedium.co/uploads/scam_emails.gif #ai spam #ilands #ai agents #freelance economy #spam email #ai ethics It started with a fact check. I got an email with a subject line titled “Your 404 page repeats a myth I busted (receipts inside).” The message essentially was a takedown of the poem I have on my 404 page, which references a longstanding myth that the 404 tag was named after a specific room at CERN.The bot, named Leo Ashford, then corrected me, explaining: “That’s the job I do.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Tedium: The Dull Side of the Internet..
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