I'm not a moderator, but I doubt any of the 90+ mods who volunteer their time on FT are spamming anyone. They've got limited amounts of time & are usually busy spending it moderating.

Cheers.

Personally knowing a majority of the moderators here, and being fully aware of how this site is run, I find the notion of mods "harvesting" members' email addresses ludicrous (and frankly, insulting). I would go as far as to simply state as fact, "did not happen."

As Jose indicated, there will be no real way to track down how or why your email address has been spammed. If you like, you can always change it.

Happens to the best of us. Spam is simply a fact of life, and there's no way to fully insulate a given email address. That's why we have access to a nearly infinite supply of them for free.

Paul

I'd have thought there was a fair chance that they would.

Either:

1. Harvest someone else's [email protected], split each into two and reassemble new addresses, either based on common patterns or just randomly;
2. Identify high volume forum sites, take the distinguishing part of sitename.com, and prepend it to a list of domains you already have.

Maybe just the way my mind is planning for evil geniusness :eek:.

I don't have a dog in the fight as my email (which isn't my own domain) has very good spam filtering tools, but to be perfectly honest, the apparent lack of concern of this issue by IB is very disturbing. Either someone (or if not a specific person, some automated system) involved with IB is purposely using information to send spam (and I don't think it is a mod for the same reasons SkiAdcock mentioned above), or they're not and the system is being hacked into. Either way, I'm amazed that the only solution and level of caring is just shrugging shoulders and saying "oh well". :td:

Hardly what is going on in this thread.

If that is what seems apparent, the facts are IB is quite serious about privacy, spam control, preventing breaches, etc. but that all goes on in the background, and certainly the methods and steps taken would not be discussed in the public fora for them to be seen by potential malefactors.

One might wonder why I'm seeing 119 (14 [signed in] members & 105 guests) in one forum, and further wonder exactly what and why the guests are reading, for example.

Howdy, all.

I submitted a report via the "contact us" mechanism and it was suggested I 'share my experience' here.

I recently received some spam to my flyertalk email address. Like some of the other reporters, I have an email address that uses address extensions so that it's specific to the site it's registered with, and not used elsewhere. Additionally, I use my own domain for email.

I'll leave the details out of this post, but suffice to say that my email address would not have been selected algorithmically; and it's certainly not used elsewhere. If it was disclosed to spammers, it was either as a result of flyertalk's owners (as some suggested earlier in the thread), or some sort of compromise/scraping of the site.

I don't care so much about the fact that I'm getting spam; part of the point of using per-domain emails is that I can easily block it; the reason I reached out via "contact" is the first place is in the belief that it's more likely a site compromise of some sort rather than intentional disclosure.


n.b., I have no reason to believe it'd be moderators scraping, but please don't be insulted when I point out it's technically possible. I think it's more likely that an account was compromised, the application has vulnerabilities like cross-site scripting or SQL injection, or a system-level compromised occurred.

n.b.b., My email address was certainly not generated algorithmically like one respondent suggested. It consists of a username, a non-standard address extension character, the target domain (flyertalk), all at my own personal domain. There is nobody else that uses my domain on flyertalk, and nobody that has my address part on another domain.

- Patrick