Mainly because despite being from two different recruiters from two different companies, in two different parts of the world, these emails read exactly the same. Verbatim. After some time Googling, I eventually found the originating job post on a company website and became quite infuriated. In fact, one of the emails did not even address me by name, the greeting line was "Hello Consultant". I decided to respond to the emails separately. This is one of them:

http://pastie.org/918524

Now, the reason I am sharing this story with you is to share the value of people. As someone who spends a lot of time with people, networking and making connections, I've seem many companies who try to build the ideal candidate based on qualifications and skills. Understandably, I sympathize with their desire to use company resources as best they possibly can. That's where things go sour. They end up hiring black hat recruiters, or employing black hat recruiter techniques like this one: nabbing job postings from future clients and blasting emails across the internet. The goal of this often results in no one actually filling the position, and the recruiter walks away with a number of new resumes. Candidates grow frustrated because they've responded to a recruiter who isn't going to work for them until it's financially convenient (i.e. they find a candidate who pays a juicy enough contingency fee), and the candidate in the long term has to continue burning up their own resources looking for work.

Beware the Black Hat recruiters. Research is obviously important when looking for more work. Research is just as important when dealing with recruiters. I just wanted to share that with HN after seeing a couple posts about startups looking to hire.