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Unacceptable behaviour from CCP
blenda
Member Posts: 10
Whenever I sign up to a new intenet service I generate a new email address. It is a pain, but I am active in the anti spam community and am sometimes targetted by spammers. So for me it is important to know where the spammers get my address from.
So I did this when I signed up with Eve Online. And until today everything was fine. Just the stuff that you would expect, signup messages, some ads and my correspondance with customer services.
But today there was 3 spam messages, I traced them and they come from one of the most notorious spammers on the net. But this does not matter, I never gave CCP permission to share my email address with anyone, let alone a spammer.
Not only is this behaviour unacceptable, it is illegal.
So be warned, if you are going to sign up with Eve Online, don't use an email address that is important to you.
Edit: It would seem that the email address was one of the ones that was leaked by the volunteer. I had emailed the forum mods about a year ago about a post I found offensive. So that would seem to be how the email address fell into the hands of the spammer.
Comments
As I said in my original post, I am active in the anti-spam community. I know how email works. I know how spam works. I gave CCP an email address. I have only used this email address with CCP. The last time I used this address was in January when I wrote to CCP's customer services. It would be a strange spammer that would wait so long to use the address if he has sniffed it.
I also trust the email company, because it is me. I run my own servers.
Advertisers, or other CCP partners, may employ a third-party measurement service for tracking the performance of an ad program. In these instances, we have no control over the information collected by the third party, and may not be held responsible for the actions of the third party measurement service where collected information is concerned. CCP may use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our Web site. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address or telephone number) about your visits to this and other Web sites in order to provide advertisements on this site and other sites about goods and services that may be of interest to you. In the course of serving advertisements to this site, our third-party advertisers may place or recognize a unique "cookie" on your browser.
If the spam is that big of a deal set up an allow list. As you did say you using the email only for EVE. Or not allow cookies from them. And as for it being illegal it may or may not be, there are too many loop holes in anti spam laws, even more so when it comes from a non-us or non u.u. company.
I'm not saying this is a good practice if they are doing it. I'm not saying spamming is right. What I am doing is defending someones right to do what they like in their country if the law permits it.
Spam is only an annoyance, it shouldn't be a reason to stop you from using a service. Sure it makes you a little scared about what they are doing with your information but this is common now. We all have our own files hidden somewhere in a scary shadow government vault. Learn to live with it instead of complaining about a few emails, or better yet read a tos before you e-sign for a service.
This is the least of EVE online players worries at the moment. Please, leave us to our crying about BOB and how they will rule everything soon.
I too practice anti-spam procedures and have done so for several years. I use the service from emailias.com to create unique email addresses for each Internet site I frequent, anything from random forums to corporate sites, including EVE. Once I started doing this I was surprised what I found...
In the past seven years, I have received ZERO spam through any of these generated email addresses - even websites I was certain were going to share my information, in fact, didn't. These email addresses are inputted into logon forms frequently and are sometimes visible in user profiles, and still no spam. Yet, my university email address, which to my knowledge is not published anywhere on the Internet (and I don't even use it directly, I use another email address to forward it) and is A RANDOM SEQUENCE OF LETTERS AND NUMBERS receives spam messages by the hundreds.
I have come to the conclusion that today, a large portion or spammed email addresses are not "harvested" from websites or via third party sales, but are in fact randomly generated and tested (just look at what happens with Internet mail sites like hotmail). This is something that no privacy policy can prevent.
As for CCP selling or otherwise using your email address you gave them for unwanted solicitation: They have had my email address in their possession for over four years. In that time I might receive a grand total of five messages to that address annually - a few community newsletters, an official survey here and there, and follow-up to customer service issues. They always keep the community updated when the latest EVE related phishing scheme makes it rounds and announce their own official mailings on the forums when they go out.
I sorry to hear that you have had issues with your email address you have given to CCP, but for me, I trust them with it more than most organizations on the Internet.
Total BS!!
You internet provider does this. So does your phone company. So does your cable company. So does your satelite company.
It is standard practice for companies in the States to do this. Even requesting them to remove ALL notices and contacts regarding any/all products will not circumvent it.
QWEST and MSN are the worse!! Yahoo does it too.
CCP does not share your information. If they do can you please provide a link to their privacy statement which says so?
If you think going through CCP is the only way a phisher can get your email....um.... *cough*noob*cough*
There is no such thing as reliable anti spamware Im sorry.... the company I work for invest tens of thousands of dollars in the stuff and has partnerships with Trend Micro and we still get spam on private adresses.... welcome to the net.
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"MMOs, for people that like think chatting is like a skill or something, rotflol"
http://purepwnage.com
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"Far away across the field, the tolling of the iron bell, calls the faithful to their knees. To hear the softly spoken magic spell" Pink Floyd-Dark Side of the Moon
The email address I generate is of the form word1.word2@word3.myowndomain. where word1, 2 and 3 are randomly selected from a dictionary and are only used once in all my generated email addresses. I have several domians that I use, I buy a new one every few months for this purpose. A spammer would need the skills of Mystic Meg to guess the email address.
I only ever use the email address for the purpose for which it was generated. Of course I make mistakes, but I am not aware of using the email address that I generated for Eve Online for any other purpose. And the only result of someone phishing for the address would be an abuse report to their ISP.
Finally, I am satisfied that CCP did not sell or otherwise sanction the distribution of the email address. I am pretty sure that the cause of the leak was the ISD Volunteer.
As for anti-spam software, I use open source stuff and public DNSBLs. Comes in at a lot less than $10K.
seams some "intelligent" take all the emails leaked from the log and add them to Spam websites
BestSigEver :P
