Message boards selling email addresses

[Daydream Believer]

Just checked my allowed senders list & the domain name of the sender is the same as the emails sent by halfcost.co.uk

I assume you have had dealings with the club using that address before though, with you being a fan and everything

This is the only place which I use that particular e-mail address because this place won't accept Hotmail, Gmail etc so it could've only came from here.

Nope, the club don't have that email address.

The only orgs who have that particular address are online retailers I've bought from since June this year. That doesn't include the club.

Checked the address that I'm registered under for here & that email wasn't sent to that address.

 

[Roger]

I'll repeat what I said before, I have never sold (or given away) any email addresses collected on the website.

The website privacy policy says we can only send emails or pass on emails if you opt-in to receive them, and the only place you would opt-in is when you register or amend your profile - the defaults are that you are opted in to receiving admin emails and out of receiving emails from other users. So unless you changed this that is what you would have now.

To date I haven't sent out any admin emails, so nobody should have received anything but the automated emails from the board.

The only other explanation is that I have a rogue moderator who is going through the users one by one and selling on their email addresses - even if that were true I would be shocked if someone in marketing at SAFC was buying them!

If you have received an email from SAFC and you haven't opted in to receiving mail from them it is illegal, no matter where they got the email address from.

I suggest you take that up with SAFC and with the people who sent the email out.

Details of how to complain to the sender of the email can be found at :

http://app.communicatorcorp.com/Fil...ssion Email Communications Policy_tmp49D1.pdf

 

[AB22 Easy Tiger]

I hope y'awll (I'm in Texas) don't mind but I'm going to move this to the Help Desk board so it'll be easy to find next time the question comes up.

 

[corkman]

If you have the same email addy on other messageboards, goole the username - if you haven't got the correct settings, you email may be visible.

It's what I noticed when googling a username.

The only emails I recieve from the club are via hotmail not the addy registered here so I believe Roger when he says they're not being sold.

 

[ReaL Madras]

I have started receiving stuff from the club to several e-mail addreses other than the e-mail address that I have registered here in the last week . I haven't got a bloody clue about this techy thing and how they could obtain e-mail addresses but the only thing that I have done differently in the last week was register on a sunderland facebook group which utilises the same address as my RTG account but not the one that I have registered with the club (which is my works one). The most intriguing thing is that however this is done, they have got to a yahoo e-mail account of mine that is niether registered here or anywhere else. Can some technophobe explain if they can search your address book or the like?

 

[BamBistOe]

It's immorale and illegal if caught, but the buying and selling of email addresses is happening all over the net in such massive quantities that it is virtually impossible to trace where the list originates and thus virtually impossible to take any definative legal action against.

Best bet is simply to protect yourself by signing up for free disposable email addresses and keeping your proper email addresses as private as possible.

There are so many ways of having your email address harvested, most of the time the site owner doesn't even know it's happened and signing up for any site heightens your risk of making it onto one of those email spamming lists.

I personally doubt very much that any respectable message board owner would bother to even try selling his members email address, for one simply because the value of a few thousand email addresses is minimal and most board owners want their boards to do well and wouldn't put that at risk for the sake of a few pence which can easily be made by simply and descreetly having google ads on the board.

The big BIG thing that most people forget, is that when signing up for anything with an email address, you are asked only once for your permission for that address to be used. If you click yes that first time, that email address potentiall can have been passed on to third parties and we all know what happens once an email address is floating around out there.

Most alleged email spamming is down to user not company not taking the necessary security precautions, not reading small print properly, not being careful who they had their info out to, etc, etc, yet fingers always get pointed every else except the person the email address belongs to.

Don't forget, when you sign up for a newsletter or mailshot by a company, your email address may be accessable to several people within the company and each individual who could send the newsletter or mailshot may have a different email address or tool for sending out the newsletter, meaning it may look like spam when it could actually be genuine.

As said, the simply thing to do if you want to not get any kind of spam, is sign up for a free email address and use that for none important stuff and keep your proper email addresses as private and secure as is earthly possible.

There are thousands of guides out there in internet land to help epople keep their email addresses private, secure and away from spam lists. If you aren't sure, go google it and read some and learn.