did United sell their mailing list?

I’m pretty used to spam, but i also track it pretty vigilantly. I have a unique email address given to each company on the web and most of them i never send anything from. Some have ended up on spam lists for different reasons. Cheap Tickets sold my address within a month. Some get distributed because of invitation policies. I stoppped reading email to my LinkedIn address because someone with a virus problem managed to send that into spamming hell.

But today, a new entry into my spamming world emerged. United.

Email addresses that are used by companies that will then send my address to others (i.e. YASNS) are human readable. They have the company name in them so that the recipient will get a clue and realize that this is a site-specific address. Not all do. But the ones given to companies like United (receipt-only) have coded numbers in them to track them over time and place. My coded United email started getting spam today. As a Unix email reader, i have never experienced a virus. I can’t conceptualize any other way in which that email address was acquired by anyone. Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. I guess they really are going bankrupt.

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4 thoughts on “did United sell their mailing list?

  1. bp

    I had the same thing happen to the address I gave United. I don’t know who they sold it to, but it seems like some some pretty unpleasant spam was coming from there. I also use coded e-mail addresses, site-specific. Even then, I still send most of my mail directly through generic spam filters, so I’m not sure how many months United had been spamming me before I noticed, but at that point I was getting many messages a day there.

    This is only one of many reasons why I don’t often fly United.

  2. Tony

    Like the new look-very soft feeling emitting from colors.

    United -I believe just exited bankruptcy-now we know how. They know at least 90% of all computer users(are annoyed by spam) but don’t react negatively to co’s who sell lists. It’s a marginal business,air travel-nothing surprises me.

  3. Ralph

    Actually, these colors kinda suck. I liked the old ones–they reminded me of the mid-90’s, very geeky grad-student’ish. Reminded me of the Athena clusters for some reason.

    This blue is hideous

  4. paul

    I’ve killed off a few site-specific email addresses:
    * slashdot: crawled by spammers
    * lindi (musician): list stolen/picked up by another musician
    * yahoo: ??
    * ebay: ??
    * cdnow: ??
    * icq: i assume this was crawled as well

    maybe some more, but they aren’t noted in my virtusertable.

    paul@ is pretty hopeless, it gets dictionary spammed. hostmaster@ appears in the whois and is useless, it is deluged with spam.

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