A Spammer Was the First to Tell Me My Chrome Extension Was Live

I have an open source project called snipo which is a snippet manager for developers (and researchers). I wrote it after using the best but abandoned snippet manager called snbibox. I wrote it with extensive help with LLM in front end. And I wrote about it in a couple of places but I never really promoted it. I just wanted to have a good snippet manager for myself mainly. It is mainly a web app but there is REST API which I have written a TUI and browser extension for it.

The browser extension was only on firefox because this was mainly me and I'm a hardcore FireFox user. But with a little bit of growing interest in the project, especially from a couple of friends who I failed to save their souls from devil called Chrome, I decided to publish the extension on Chrome Web Store. I was a bit hesitant because I knew that Google is not very friendly to developers and they have a history of banning extensions (and whole accounts) for no reason (at least that they don't tell). Also I didn't want to use my primary Google account because who knows what could happen.

So I had a secondary Google account which I used to publish the extension. I regitered for the chrome store developer account and paid the $5 fee. I uploaded the extension and submitted it for review. And that was it. I didn't receive any email from Google about the review process. But I didn't care because I was busy with other things. But after a couple of days, I recieved an email from someone offering his services to help with acquiring users for my extension. This is the text of the email:

Hello,

My name is <*****>, and I got your contact from your extension: Snipo - Code Snippet. I am reaching out because I noticed your extension doesn't have enough users and which also needs to be optimised on the chrome web search.

While researching on the chrome web store, I came across your extension and noticed what it offers and its advantages to users out there. I believe this is a great opportunity to tell you…