I’m not worried about LinkdIn in particular. I’m worried about thousands of lesser known sites that one or more of the mods might visit, hit the wrong key, and provide email addresses of dozens or hundreds of precious snowflake members like me. 
I Think all Mods/Admins should remove all dopers from their email contact lists, but I'll settle ...
So, swap your email for one that’s completely disassociated with you. It’s frustrating now because they always want another email for confirmation so you have to make an email that is connected to your real email and then use the email you just created to make a third email. Deactivate the middle email and you now have your email and an anonymous email.
If this whole thing horrifies you so much, you should create a special email address just for message boards. Maybe you could start a thread about it in GQ since you seem to be so puzzled about how things like this work. Your request that a bunch of other people change how they do things because of something that bothers you and no one else is bizarre.
SDMB is supposed to protect my information, and because of this they are not. I don’t think it’s bizarre to be concerned about it. Someone responsible for this board made an error and released email addresses for an unknown number of members. It can and almost certainly will happen again due to the very nature of the internet. It is not unreasonable for those people to take an extra step that costs nothing to provide a little more security for the rest of us.
And I must say I don’t like your tone and hyperbole. My questions and responses have been entirely reasonable and rational, and don’t merit the snark you’re giving me.
Sometimes I wonder why people even bother going ON the internet if they’re so concerned about their contact info.
I’m not sure it’s reasonable to assume this will happen again if it just happened for the first time in the history of the board. I apologize for the inconvenience, Boyo Jim, but your personal information was not given away. What was given away was your email address, and your email is also viewable to everyone on the board through your user profile. Many members create new email accounts just for SDMB communications, and you could do the same if you’re concerned about your email address being passed around via the Straight Dope. I am not sure making the mods create new email addresses solves this problem.
Ok. Bye.
No offense meant by this, I mean absolutely none, but, is your identity here meant to be private and secret? You’re rather publicly the recipient of a well known award and it literally takes five seconds on google to find your name, age, hometown, occupation, etc. Again, I mean absolutely no offense or disrespect, I just thought you were kinda famous already. I remember being delighted hearing you interviewed on NPR, and I can barely pay attention to my immediate surroundings.
…the board does protect your information. You stated:
“I exchanged two emails with Ed”
When you exchange emails with someone, invariably you go into their contact list. I have 538 names in my contact list. I’m sure if you had sent me a message sometime in the last five years you would be sitting there, in my contact list. Everyone I interact with gets added to my contact list: not everyone does this but a large amount of people do.
What you are asking is unreasonable and unrealistic. Getting added to a contact list when you send an email to someone is accepted, normal practice. Ed didn’t get your email address from the SDMB secure database. You gave it to him. If you don’t want to accidentally get added to various lists: then you need to contact everyone you have ever interacted with via email and ask them to remove you from their contact lists.
If this error had something to do with the SDMB server then you may have cause for complaint. But there isn’t a privacy breach by the straight dope here.
I’m just gonna say one more thing in response to this. Neither of us has any idea whether this is the first time in the history of the board this has happened. This is the first time I actually recognized a name from here in the subject line of spam. There may be other times when they got the name from one of you folks and didn’t use it as part of the content of the spam. Shit, I get 20-30 spams a day, for all I know, none of them or all of them might have been harvested from mods.
What email provider do you have? That is certainly not the case with Yahoo. You have to choose to add an address, though maybe there’s a switch somewhere that you can hit to automate the process. Still, it’s a choice you make, it’s not inevitable. It it was, I would have thousands of addresses on my list, most of them from spammers who got my address from somewhere else.
AFAIK, the same applies to Gmail. My contact list doesn’t have a fraction of the addresses I’ve either received from or sent to.
…I use gmail, outlook, and my own domain. And getting names added to my contact list is a behaviour that I prefer. We get that you do it differently. But if you want to get taken off people’s contact lists you can’t single out Ed and the mods: you have to contact everyone you have ever interacted with because odds are on you’ve been added.
…heck: gmail even adds people I’ve tagged in Picasa as a contact! Which can get awkward when I tag someone with a funny name and a day later that name ends up in my contact list. (Must remember to turn that off!)
The problem is that gmail adds everyone who ever emails you @gmail.com to your contact list. I use my gmail for Craigslist and there’s a bunch of people I’ve sold shit to who I never intend to speak to again on my contact list. I only know this because I’ve used the gmail web interface - if I only collected the mail via POP I wouldn’t even know.
When google introduced their silly first try at social networking, Wave maybe, they accidentally hooked everyone up via gmail contact list. And everyone was like “WTF?! I don’t want to be friend with my ex and this guy I sold a tv to!” It was pretty shitty and IMHO the main reason why their first try went south fast.
So Ed didn’t add anyone to his contact list. Gmail did. Ed did fuck up by letting LinkedIn have access to his account but as far as Ed knows he’s only ever added a handful of people to his list on purpose. He didn’t even know everyone else was on it.
Ed if you want to manage your contact list go to the gmail website and poke around. There might even be a setting to keep gmail from auto-adding people, which we see is a shitty default setting.
ETA: ninja’d!
I understand I can’t be protected by singling out Ed and the mods. However, Marly has already said they recommend a dedicated email for mods, so clearly they understand this is an entirely reasonable thing to do. I don’t see why changing the instructions to telling mods this is necessary, rather than merely a suggestion, is unreasonable or an undue burden on anyone.
Sorry, this is flat out not true. Gmail does not do this automatically. Maybe you found a setting to make it automatic, but you must have sought it out and switched in on. I’ve never looked for such a setting among all the settings in my gmail account, so I know have haven’t switched anything related to it either on or off. And my account does not add any new addresses to my contact list unless I tell it to.
Because if the 10 or so mods and admins do this, it will have effectively no effect on the security of your info. If this is the first time you got linkedin spam, consider yourself lucky.
For our convenience: it keeps our other email addresses from getting filled up with thread reports. It’s not because we’re concerned we’ll accidentally spam a bunch of Dopers.
Ed and I have communicated again, and a gmail account was not involved in the incident. You don not know, nor do I, whether he adds all new email addresses as a habit, or he has set his account to do so. If Ed wishes to address this, he’s welcome to.
As in: the feature is there…you need to turn it off.