From email sent to the University of Toronto's InterNIC WHOIS contact email address recently, from one vals@capris.com:

Good evening,

Our site monitoring software has alerted us that someone from your organization was doing a search on Google.ca for "Toronto collocation" and you visited our site, [deleted].

I was just wondering if your search was successful and if we can help you with your current or future hosting or collocation needs?

[...]

Val Slastnikov
Director, Strategic Alliances

The Capris Group

Yes, certainly, the best way to persuade people at the University of Toronto to do business with you is to spam them. And it definitely looks clueful to ask the InterNIC WHOIS contact for an organization with, oh, 60,000 people or so using its network if some random search was successful. And finally there is the chutzpah of offering hosting and colocation services to one of Canada's largest universities.

(I am assuming, generously, that there was a real search. I am an optimist. Also, I'm sure that this is more or less automated spam, so that no thinking human being ever looked at who it was being sent to. Which is yet another way to impress us with your attention to detail, or lack thereof.)

Unfortunately they have their own ASN and /22 (204.10.240.0/22, AS 33162, which is also where the email came from), so I suspect that my request to their upstream route to do something about this is going to be ignored. (But then, this is nothing new.)