"I read your profile and I think you'd be perfect for this role" - Amazon recruiter, who didn't notice I'd stopped working at Amazon 4 weeks before, as clearly indicated on the profile they 'read'.
They aren't even outside of the norm. Technical recruiters are about 90% bullshitters who would say anything at all if it meant they got you into an interview. I'm with my current company in large part because our recruiter is in the other 10%.
Facebook:
I came across your Github profile and I noticed your long-stack-traces and evil.css projects have been gaining quite some traction on Github.
Fitbit:
P.S. Cool to see long-stack-traces and evil-css getting some love!
unnnamed venture-funded startup:
I found your profile on Github and I like all the work you've done with JavaScript and node (and especially evil.css)
This one actually seemed genuine:
Oh man, I remember evil.css. A guy I used to work with set it as my Safari user stylesheet, then forgot about it. I don't use Safari all the time, so it took me a while to realize something was wrong, and even longer for that guy to remember what he'd done to my machine. So uh... thanks for that. :P
OTOH, there's no reason that sort of email can't be generated from a list of templates either.
My favorite was when a recruiter obliquely referenced something I'd once tweeted complaining about recruiter spam.
I came across your Github profile and I noticed your ipv6 enabled goatse steganography projects have been gaining quite some traction on Github.
The funny thing is that I've had several smaller / more local recruiters comment on it and laugh. They get a small amount of respect / hold my attention longer than the first line of the email.
If it was less than once every two weeks, it wouldn't be such a problem. Heck, once in three months like in the article sounds like a huge improvement. They are seriously relentless.
I got this.. about once a month when I worked for a major telecom.
example: You're a freebsd/netbsd/openbsd sysadmin with a CCNP and some asshat is trying to recruit you for a front end HTML5/CSS UI/UX designer position. Seriously. Jesus christ.
a) Emailing people that just switched jobs is a waste; most people will stay a year at least.
b) Who wants to go work for a company that is having layoffs?
Fortunately I'm happy where I am now but I was astounded at the brazenness.