I haven’t replied to any, but I looked at some, and they don’t all call for a verification email. Particularly scary was one from Pizza Hit, which said, “This is the first of many special offers you will receive…” and didn’t require a verification. If another arrives, I’ll look for a way to unsubscribe.
I Think all Mods/Admins should remove all dopers from their email contact lists, but I'll settle ...
Yeah, definitely scary. I’d be contacting cyber security firms in your area if I were you.
Was it like a special offer you can’t refuse? When those Pizza guys put a Hit out on you, it’s definitely cause for concern.
Hey Jim, maybe you should just let it ride for tonight, get some rest and take a fresh look at the situation in the morning. The situation itself will be unchanged but perhaps your perspective may be a bit more circumspect.
True. I once heard of a case where a guy got an email mentioning deep dish pizza and breadsticks. I don’t need to tell you how that turned out. Suffice it to say that he “got a bit of indigestion,” if you know what I mean.
Sleepin’ wid de anchovies.
I’m just kind of confused how this would ever happen. What button would I need to press in order to do this, even accidentally? Because I have no emails stored in any of my email accounts (I don’t use my address book in any of them)…so I’m not exactly sure how it would be possible.
My guess as to what happened–Your recent flood of spam is probably not connected to Ed’s accidental Linkedin thing. You had a publicly displayed email address in your user profile. Someone, possibly one or more of the members here, saw it, saw this thread, and decided to fuck with you by signing you up for various spam sites.
That sucks, and whoever did it is an asshat, but you share the blame because you had a publicly displayed email address. There is no requirement that you display an email address here. You chose to do so. Anyone could have seen it and used it for good or ill. The same thing could happen to me or anyone else that has a public email address.
This is not a SDMB problem. There is nothing they could have done, short of making it impossible for you to display an email address, that would have prevented this from happening.
Hey, you could send some of those Pizza Hut coupons my way – I like Pizza Hut.
It’s the Streisand Effect in action.
It’s what we do best.
I will explain this to you the same way I explained it to my 11-year-old child when we set up his first email address last year.
You have one email address that you use for personal correspondence. That’s the one that you check daily and the one that you use for emailing teachers, friends, and others.
You have another email address that you use for signing up for stuff. Any site that requires an email address for registration, you give it that one. Then if someone starts spamming you, it doesn’t matter, because you only use that email address for registration stuff and you don’t check it on a regular basis.
As has already been explained to you, your contact information (or, as you continue to hilariously call it, your “data”) already exists in the address books of pretty much everyone you have ever corresponded with on the Internet. It is entirely possible and I would even say likely that some of these people have, whether deliberately or inadvertently, made your “data” public to other sites, such as Facebook or LinkedIn. If this is the first time you’ve ever had this happen, you are very lucky, although I’m not sure “lucky” is the right word because this is honestly an incredibly small deal and I am sort of bewildered by your outrage.
Perfect post.
It could happen to anyone who does use their address book. As it happened to Ed Zotti a few days ago in LinkdIn, when he accidentally gave them more than a thousand email addresses from his contact list to spam, including mine. There is an ATMB thread about it.
Um, yeah, we all, including Jim knew this. He said so a couple of posts earlier.
Yeah, but it’s more authoritative when **Oakminster **says it.
You are being Warned for “being a jerk” in this About This Message Board thread.
There is room for disagreement in About This Message Board but you must be civil about it and this is way over the line.
TubaDiva
Administrator
And if you really want to get fancy, you use an email service like gmail, which allows you to generate an infinite number of unique addresses to give out to people just by adding a suffix to your address. Say you’re boyojim@gmail.com. When you sign up for the straight dope message board, you give them boyojim+straightdope@gmail.com as the address. When you sign up for linkedin, you give them boyojim+linkedin@gmail.com as the address. They all go to the same email box, so you still get the email, but if you decide one of them is too spammy, you don’t need to trust them to honor your unsubscribe request, because you can just create a filter that sends all email to boyojim+<whatever>@gmail.com to the trash. I’ve been doing this for at least 15 years now and it works flawlessly. Just about the only downside is that occasionally someone is confused when you’re giving your email address to them in person. “Wait, your email address is boyojim+1800flowers@gmail.com? Are you sure?”
Yes, I know.
My point is…not all staff use it, so there’s not a huge case to why custom emails should be mandatory.
I just checked my email, and there were over twenty emails in my junk mail folder, many offering me services to increase the size of my manhood. I know I did not request these services as I do not need these services, and so I am at a loss as to how they came to be sent to me.
Can I also request that the admins check who has been looking at my profile, and please let me know the names of the people who might be sending me these emails.