Seems someone at snapfish sold their user list to spammers

I use a remailing service that creates a new email address for each and every website I register at. This means I know when some company lies about sharing their user list, and, since I never use any such company again, I can just cancel the affected email and be done with it. I NEVER send email from one of those addresses, so the only way they can ever be discovered is if someone shares/sells/steals a user database.

Today I started getting spam from the address I used to sign up at HP's snapfish site. I created the account a long time ago when trying to pick a free host and have never used it since. There is no chance I have the wrong email address, that some other company shared my address, because the one that was shared is "snapfish.X@X.com where the X's are replaced with other stuff.

In other words, I strongly suspect that some junior customer support tech or other underpaid geek supplemented their income by selling their large userlist.

The first spam was titled "PDF it" and was from Laurie Patel, jrwani@boston4less.com. Anyone else that uses snapfish see this? I've emailed snapfish but thought I'd share my concerns on here.

Spam is one of the icky parts of modern life and when a large site is compromised I consider it a big deal, especially since it is usually impossible to tell where spammers get their addresses.

Thanks,
Fitzhugh

I use the same technique for making unique disposable e-mail addresses. No less than TD-Ameritrade (yeah, the trading house, who are entrusted with people's financial data!) released 3 of my addresses to spammers. I could shut off those addresses to contain the damage, thankfully, but it took TDA 2 years to acknowledge the leak (not until it became glaringly obvious and their lies must have got too embarrassing for them to leave hanging out in public), all the while j**king me around and blowing smoke in my ear about how they were sorry but it couldn't be them, they'd look into it, send us this, send us that....

It happens.

I have a hotmail account that I use to register for websites. I don't use it for anything else. Last time I was in there to activate something there was like 5000 spam emails in there - not counting whatever was auto filtered by hotmail.

OdiN1701 wrote in post #4823997
I have a hotmail account that I use to register for websites. I don't use it for anything else. Last time I was in there to activate something there was like 5000 spam emails in there - not counting whatever was auto filtered by hotmail.

ditto - rotate among 4 different randomly named accounts.

Darsk47 wrote in post #4826200
ditto - rotate among 4 different randomly named accounts.

Yeah, the service I use is great because it creates a new address for each site, and does so via a right click option in the browser, allowing me to toss any that are used like this without then stopping email from other sources. I used to use the hotmail approach but found I had to create too many new accounts there as each started receiving spam.

There are a number of such services, check out
http://en.wikipedia.or​g/wiki/Disposable_emai​l_address
for more info if you don't use one. I certainly find it helps.

The same has happened to me. See http://****/2euj4q

Did you complain with TRUSTe?

Great info guys. Thanks. I have an account that I use for the garbage sites as well, but it keeps getting filled up with too much spam as well. It would be great to figure out where exactly the leak is (so to speak).

Thanks. I'll be checking those out.