I Think all Mods/Admins should remove all Dopers from their email contact lists, but I’ll settle … for removing my email address.
This is in reference to this thread, in which we learn Ed Zotti hit a wrong button in LinkdIn and provided those folks with his entire contact list to market to. I exchanged two emails with Ed on one day more than 5 years ago, and so I got picked up in the sweep.
So far I’ve received two emails from them, which isn’t as awful as it might be. But I have further concerns. Maybe they do this monthly. Or maybe they’ll sell my email address to others – after all, since I don’t have an account, AFAIK they haven’t promised to keep any of my information confidential. So maybe they won’t sell their members emails, but they may consider all their contact list email acquisitions to be fair game.
Actually, if anyone reading this has a LinkdIn account, I’d be grateful if you can look at the registration agreement and post whether there is any language regarding information harvested by these contact list sweeps. But then again, perhaps when Ed hit that wrong button, he also agreed to some other rules about how his information could be used. So, anything that you folks can tell me about this would be great.
I think that all Dopers names should be removed from all Mods contact lists, but obviously I can’t speak for all Dopers. I invite any other Dopers who feel the same way to post here. Meanwhile, I ask you mods, and I’ve corresponded with a few of you, to remove my address from your list, if it’s on it.
As to how to retain emails, I dunno. I would think that if you just keep the email you found in a folder, the address won’t be picked up in such a sweep. Might I be wrong about that? And of course, out email addresses are available through our user information on the boards.
Doesn’t everyone have multiple emails fir this kind of thing? Just recently I created a new hotmail and linked it in my profile, since my yahoo is now being used for some important stuff.
The obvious answer is to create @straightdope.com email addresses for the mods, and have them do all mod-style stuff (and nothing but mod-stuff) through those addresses.
The email address I use for this board is a gaming account, not tied to my real name or professional identity. I rarely even check that account outside of fantasy football season. Mods & admins that happen to have me in their contact list are welcome to keep me there…but if any of them actually need to talk to me for some reason, the PM system here is quicker and more likely to get a timely response.
I accept as a given in this day and age that any email address I create will stay private for exactly as long as I don’t use it. I’ve got a delete button, and I’m not afraid to use it.
Realistically, anyone who’s ever used an email address has to know that it can end up in places they didn’t intend. My own dear aunt has flung my own private, official email address to the winds by forwarding hundreds of glurge emails to her entire address book. Such is life.
I’m still hurt that I didn’t get caught in the maelstrom, of course, so you should take that into account when considering my opinion.
My apologies for having spammed you, along with roughly 1,000 other people (seriously). I see from another post I’m not the first to have made this mistake. I’m happy to remove you from my email list if (a) someone will tell me how to do this - is it simply a matter of deleting a name from my gmail contact list? and (b) if you, Boyo Jim, will send me an email at edzotti at gmail dot com telling me the address to which LinkedIn sent the unwanted messages - I’ve looked up the email address in your profile and find nothing like this in my contacts.
As for purging all Doper names from all mod contacts list, this isn’t a reasonable request. If I’m any indication, and I’m less social than many, anyone with a reasonably active email correspondence has thousands of names in (probably) multiple locations. I have no idea who most of these people are, although it’s fair to say the great majority have nothing to do with the SDMB. (I just don’t write that many notes to SDMB members.) Culling the list of everyone I’m certain I’ll never correspond with again would take hours and isn’t warranted by the harm done. You’ve gotten, and may get, a few emails. Please delete or ignore them. I regret having foolishly clicked on that damn button but let’s not make this a bigger deal than it is.
I don’t use the email address posted here for anything other than SD business, so ye need fear not that there’ll be any harvesting* from a third party as a result of corresponding with me.
Awwww…and here I was, feeling all “special” because Ed Zotti wanted me to join his professional network. [sub]for no reason that I could even remotely perceive, but still…[/sub]
Ed Zotti, do you feel you were somehow duped into clicking on the evil LinkedIn authorization button, by which you authorized LinkedIn to harvest and then spam your entire e-mail list? Was it cleverly and deceptively worded? Was it written to look like something innocuous, or something you needed to click on anyway to obtain some LinkedIn service?
If so, you could make amends (sort of) by composing a seriously nasty nastygram addressed to LinkedIn (with some help from a real live lawyer perhaps, in seriously nasty legal language), sent to LinkedIn via Registered United States Snail-Mail, clarifying that you did NOT knowingly consent nor authorize such use of your e-mail list, and demanding that ALL address thus harvested from you be totally and permanently expunged from LinkedIn’s files.
Post a copy of that letter here in this thread, and likewise post their response.
More than a thousand people? So, Ed, is there some switch you pushed in your email program to put every single incoming email address onto your contact list? Because my contact list has 129 people and I know every single one of them personally or professionally or both, and that address has been active since the 90s. You are not on it, and neither is Tuba Diva, who I’ve corresponded with several times over the years. The only one who was (because I’ve now removed him/her) is Coldfire, oddly enough I have no memory at all of any correspondence between us. But then, I didn’t remember yours either, until I was reminded of a specific incident by another poster.
Maybe it’s not reasonable to go through and purge your gazillion contacts, but I think it is reasonable for the mods to use dedicated email addresses only for SDMB business. Ok, you don’t correspond with many members outside the boards, and I happened to be one of the unlucky few. But how many other mods a lot more than you? The two of us would never have corresponded except that I suggested something to Tuba Diva, who forwarded it to you and you responded directly to me, starting a very brief exchange between the two of us.
I would actually love to hear from some of the other mods about their contact list for the email addresses posted in the SDMB. Ellen has already noted that she only uses hers for SDMB business. Is that common? Rare? Have you folks ever discussed this among yourselves?
I would say a majority of the mods have email accounts just for the message board. We don’t require that new mods create SDMB-only emails, but we recommend it.
I’d like it better if mods scanned through their contact lists for other accounts that they use for social network services and purge the names of Dopers they recognize. That would prevent us from being spammed when one of you makes an error like Ed did. Failing that, at least a dedicated SDMB address will prevent the same problem with any future SDMB correspondents that haven’t made it onto your lists yet.
I understand how easy it is to hit the wrong thing on a message board, and I don’t believe these mistakes can be eliminated, as some sites are pretty much designed with that in mind. I just think that, knowing this will be an inevitable and recurring problem, there should be an extra layer of insulation between them and SDMB members. Particularly when the layer is free of any cost besides maybe 5 minutes to set up such an account.
I got on someone’s linkedi list through a similar goof a while back and got exactly two emails from them. Not bad, really. I get a lot more spam than that every day. I don’t think you should worry, Boyo Jim.
