Like many in the PR and journalism blogosphere, I get PR pitches by email every day.

Like many, too, I welcome pitches if they are relevant to my interests. If they are, the chances are good that I will talk about the product or service, either in my blogs or podcast, or I might Twitter about it.

Those emails are currently averaging eight. Every day. The vast majority, though, I regard as spam, pure and simple.

In fact, PR spam is a topic that is constantly on the tips of online tongues.

What’s my definition of ‘PR spam’? Any one or all of this:

• The product or service being pitched by email is so obviously not one that I would have much interest in, a fact that would be very easily apparent if the pitcher had taken even a cursory glance at this blog or listened to my podcast.
• The email includes an unsolicited Word document attachment. And it’s worth noting that not everyone uses Word. I do but the pitcher doesn’t know that.
• The pitcher writes a pseudo-friendly greeting but it only looks like a bad database mail merge. My favourite: “Hi, Neville ,” (notice the space between my name and the final comma). A close second is the simple “Hi ,” with that same space (yes, I’ve had lots of emails like that).

Mostly, I regard such PR spam is just another consequence of being online and being accessible. You know, along with the email offers for knock-off replica watches, Viagra and other sexual performance enhancements, and winning the Euro lottery.

This is borne out by the majority of those emails being automatically caught by the McAfee spam and junk mail filters in Outlook.

Now and again, I might send one along to Kevin Dugan for the Bad Pitch Blog although lame PR pitches are no longer hot news items for that blog.

There are just too many of them.

All that said, I do get increasingly worried for the overall reputation of our profession as if I’m getting such crap every day, imagine what journalists working in the mainstream media must be getting.