Since 2003, I have been very careful when giving my email address out to others. Whenever I'm forced to give it out, I append a unique identifier that will allow me to identify the account if the address ever gets into the hands of spammers.
For a couple of years, things were going well. It appeared that most online retailers were doing a good job of keeping their mailing lists secure. But that all changed a few months ago.
Since the first 'leak', I've been keeping track of the scale of the problem. I usually try to contact the company that I originally gave the address to. Since the number of leaks seems to be accelerating, I've put together this page to track and shame the guilty.
To give a sense of scale to these results, I should mention that I've used about 100 unique email addresses over the past three years or so. These are the only ones that have generated spam, so far.
Feb 2006
This was the first leak. It's also the worst. This address appears to have gotten out into the wild. I receive about 20 spams a day on this address alone. The first one came about a year after the original transaction, shortly after a marketing email received from SCOTTEVEST.
I contacted SCOTTEVEST, and they were cooperative. They put me in contact with their 'email marketing' company, Publishing Dynamics (www.publishingdynamics.com), which claimed that someone had 'guessed' the account name. This is very unlikely, since the address consists of my name followed by a suffix of 'evest'.
There's no way to know whether the leak originated with SCOTTEVEST or with Publishing Dynamics. But the fact that there were two companies involved meant that they just pointed the finger at each other. I didn't get the feeling that anything was going to be done about it.
May 2006
I don't think Amazon leaked my address directly, because I've never had a leak from them before, and have been a customer since the company started. I think it happened when I bought a 'third-party' book through a non-amazon used book seller. I'm not completely certain which one it may have been, so I will avoid naming them directly.
July 5th, 2006
This appears to have fallen into the hands of the bad guys. I got a 'work from home' spam to this account. I contacted CarsDirect, gave them a copy of the message. I received a reply thanking me for the information, but nothing further. However, I have yet to receive more spam, so it's possible they found the leak and stopped it. We'll see!
Aug 10, 2006
I'm having trouble remembering why I gave this address out, since I don't believe I received mail from Pinnacle. The suffix used was 'pinnacle'. Most likely this had to do with registering software for an HDTV card. Regardless - on Aug 10th 2006 I received a spam from 'Bally Fitness' entitled "Free XM Radio from Bally Total Fitness". I'm having trouble seeing the connection between video hardware, satellite radio, and 'fitness'.