Quora is a company with a made up name, two very rich founders, and a very, very ambitious goal: to categorize all the world's knowledge. Maybe that'll happen someday, but in the meantime, it's sending out some seriously annoying email.

If you've seen a message like this land in your email:

and the person in question has no clue what's going on—they didn't mean to follow you, and they might not even know what Quora is—you're not at all alone. We've seen an uptick in inexplicable messages from Quora, and when I asked why, for example, a friend who had signed up for Quora but then deactivated his account was still sending me notification messages, the company said only that "the e-mail notification was probably queued/pushed before the user deactivated his/her account" but declined to discuss further.

The site probably is more popular than ever (in extremely relative terms) but it also uses some Path-esque methods to reach your friends' inboxes, like auto-opting for almost every possible excuse to trigger an email.

The signup process can be just as confusing, making it easy, it would seem, for someone to spam you through a thing they don't even know exists—it's at least drummed up a lot of Quora discussion about Quora.

And now let us take a long break from thinking, writing, or saying the word "Quora."