It is not uncommon to send chaperoned emails to your list; that's where your friend includes a message from the sponsor in his regular newsletter.
Someone else gets their marketing message out to his list, but doesn't get his emails.
Ask HN: Have you ever been contacted to sell your user's information?
11–20 of 43 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been contacted to sell your user's information?
#12I've never been contacted but here is a #lifehack if you use gmail sign up with youremail+domain to track who is selling your info.
Could a smart marketer simply query the list for all emails with "+" and truncate from there?
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been contacted to sell your user's information?
#13I've never been contacted but here is a #lifehack if you use gmail sign up with youremail+domain to track who is selling your info.
More than a few sites refuse '+' in their email address validators.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been contacted to sell your user's information?
#14I've never been contacted but here is a #lifehack if you use gmail sign up with youremail+domain to track who is selling your info.
More than a few sites refuse '+' in their email address validators.
I've always wondered if those site inputs are due to ignorance of RFC 2822, or because they are aware of it and are basically letting you know that your address is going out the door. Bad either way :/
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been contacted to sell your user's information?
#15A long time ago I ran a file hosting service that almost exclusively served one particular "fringe" community (for some reason it got really popular on one site and spread from there). I was running it anonymously at the time (for both me and for the users), and logging was minimal...
... so imagine my surprise when I received an e-mail (at the abuse@ address, no less) offering to buy uploader/downloader info (IPs, file info, email addresses, etc.)
Imagine their surprise when I told them that I didn't have most of what they wanted in the first place, and that they could kindly go suck a pig. I checked out the company in question, and they seemed rather sparsely established, so my assumption was that they were a shell company for somebody. Never really looked into it after I told them to go to hell, and never heard back from them. AFAIK there wasn't a lot of pirate traffic (I shut that down and banned/reported aggressively whenever I found it/was notified about piracy or other illegal stuff), mostly just niche content that I assume was original... so I doubt it was an MPAA/RIAA thing. Odd.
(Sorry for keeping names out of it. The site was super well-known within the community, and I'd rather keep my involvement in said community quite isolated from my real life.)
Glad to be out of the file host business, that's for sure.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been contacted to sell your user's information?
#16Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been contacted to sell your user's information?
#17I'm developing GPS based mobile games and I've been curious about being approached for this -- from advertisers or governments.
One possible defense is to use an open inbox, publically available. Perhaps?
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been contacted to sell your user's information?
#18I've never been contacted but here is a #lifehack if you use gmail sign up with youremail+domain to track who is selling your info.
In a similar vein, I keep a domain set up with an open mail address for anything at that domain. I sign-up with the format of the domain and date as my email prefix.
Surprisingly I've only seen one misuse of email address doing this for a few years. And I sign-up to competition and the usual suspects quite regularly. The bigger one I find abused these days is phone numbers. I guess it's harder to track source hence more dodgy brothers activity here.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been contacted to sell your user's information?
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could a smart marketer simply query the list for all emails with "+" and truncate from there?
Yes and some websites refuse + in email.
That would be preferable to what happened to me once. I tried using a + filter and it was accepted but I never received booking information for my trip. When my trip was getting closer I realized I didn't have a confirmation number, and after a long conversation with customer service, it turned out that instead of "+@gmail.com" my email address was saved as " @gmail.com", so nothing ever made it through to me.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been contacted to sell your user's information?
#20Back on my first job, a small company wanted to use our software, but only if we copied their competitor's database (Their competitor was already our client)