Old97s.com

The email I used as my login for this site was unique and only used for this site. Yesterday I got spam addressed to that email.  My favorite band but not is not cool.  Glad I didn't use my main email.

tampakevin, I'm sorry to read your post. I would not be doing my job properly if I did not respond. We absolutely *do not sell or give away any of our members' information to any third parties* and we do not do anything with members' information except use it in the ways specified when you sign up for either a site account or for the mailing list.

That is not legal speak, there is nothing hidden in the sign up process  - site members can log into the site through their accounts to use the store and boards and to post comments on news items under their username and that is all the membership, and the information required for it, is for. Mailing list members receive our newsletters and that is all the mailing list sign up, and the information required for it, is for.

There's no way for me to explain what happened with your email address, I can only say that there has been *no breach of our systems whatsoever*. Spammers work with many pieces of information and are far more sophisticated now than just buying lists of email addresses from other people.

Working in the online world is my full time job, I can tell you that I am extremely careful with the information I give out and I have more than a couple alternative email addresses, all of which collect spam even when not given out. It's crazy, but spamming people is a huge business and spam happens.

That said, I urge all of you to read the privacy policy and terms of use for anything you sign up for. Ours is linked from our sign up page, but here it is again:

Privacy Policy: http://www.old97s.com/INFO/OLD_privacy.aspx 

Terms of Use: http://www.old97s.com/INFO/OLD_tou.aspx

Amber

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Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

Not that she needs it, but let me vouch for Amber. I run the fan site at hitbyatrain.com, and for years also received mail at various hitbyatrain.com e-mail addresses. Then, slowly but surely, I started getting these "Out Of Office," "Address Not Found" and other returned e-mail for messages I had not sent.

Weird, huh?

Turns out spammers had somehow hijacked the hitbyatrain.com domain, at least on e-mail, and were flooding the universe with SPAM. It got so bad that started getting SPAM from *myself* on my non-hitbyatrain.com e-mail accounts. How do they do that? I have no idea; I just know it happened.

That's when I asked the ISP to turn off that e-mail, yet it still continues going out on occasion. I even have hitbyatrain.com on my e-mail "blacklist" so that I can't get any e-mail from a domain name I own. Sad but true. The good part about owing all hitbyatrain.com email addresses was that I could "seed" my e-mail address. For example, if I registered at the Dallas Morning News website, I would use "DallasMorningNews@hitbyatrain.com." That way I could tell if they later sold or rented out my info.

But like you soon I discovered that even if an organization didn't share its lists, an ambitious spammer will rent a another list with hundreds of millions of computer-generated addresses, just to get a few thousand live ones.

I'd be willing to bet that may have happened to you too.

Yeah, I get spam (supposedly) from myself on a regular basis.  Of course, this is with my one e-mail address, so it's out there all over the place.  A few weeks back, I must have received about 250 notifications of bounced e-mails, with the catch being that I never sent the originals.  Some spammer using my address did.  And the bulk of them were in other languages, like Hebrew and Russian (at least I think it was Russion!).