A while back I agreed to beta test Reuters new Powerscreener tool for screening publicly-traded stocks. As part of doing that I had to give Reuters an email address that I check regularly. But clueless nitwits that Reuters apparently is, on Friday the company sent out a major email to all the beta-testers without using bcc — in other words, we could all see each others’ email addresses, and we could respond to one another. It was a dumb thing for Reuters to do, not to mention a gross violation of privacy.
And, of course, it has had precisely the effect I would expect. Having implicitly identified myself as being interested in trading technology I have been hit by a barrage of offers and enticements in the last twenty-four hours from a**-holes who were on the list and have decided that they’d like to flog their wares. Granted, I have many email addresses and this is just one, albeit one that I do use now and then, but I think Reuters owes me — and everyone they’ve just managed to wildly inconvenience — a very big apology.
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Yeah, this is the type of thing that caused me to start using userid-*@domain.com email addresses, where *@domain.com goes to my main email address. Then you can just send userid-reuters@domain.com to /dev/null as soon as you start receive spam etc. at that address.
I used to religiously do this when submitting my email address, until a year or so ago when I decided that bayesian spam filtering was good enough that it didn’t matter. But I’ve started again due to issues like the one above (where it’s not your standard spam), plus when I get virus emails that are to one of these specific addresses I know exactly from where it came…
I did also have a problem with equifax related to a custom address; an equifax phone rep accidentally put someone else’s order on my account, when I called to say that I had not in fact ordered that report, I was transfered around to the fraud department, where it took them over three months to figure out what happened, and the woman eventually told me that the fact that my email address was userid-equifax@domain.com had initially made her suspicious of me…
rule #1. never give out real information on the web unless you absolutely are forced to. note the email address i have provided here.
Nothing scares some firms more than their customers talking to each other. Maybe the spam is a denial of service attack on that scenario
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