Email address passed on to competition partners

[MrsArthurWellesley]

Bit disappointed that my email address has been passed on to a competition partner after entering a competition at Christmas. Not sure that was made terribly clear on entering.

Hi MrsArthur,

Thanks for raising this. It shouldn't have been unless you were specifically told at the time of entering. let us know which comp and we will take a look for you.

Hi Rebecca, it was the Vinnie and Dean one. I'm now getting emails from them - admittedly only two, but I'm sure you'll appreciate that it's the principle of the thing. And I've just died a little having to bring the principle into it.

Sorry, Vinnie and D.

Hi again MrsArthurWellesley - we're just going to drop you a mail about this as we just one as we want to double check a few things, and you probably don't want to be posting your email address up here for all and sundry to see

So sorry it's taken us an age to come back to you on this one.

We've had a good dig and the horrible truth is that this was completely an MNHQ human error thing. We were keeping two lists (a list of the email addresses of competition entrants; and a list of email addresses of people who'd agreed to have their details passed on to Vinnie and D), and we gave Vinnie and D the wrong list.

We're extremely sorry We've had a thorough look at our procedures now and we're confident that this won't happen again (not that that is much consolation if yours was one of the email addresses handed over in error).

Vinnie and D are aware of what's happened; they can't scrub the erroneous email addresses from their list at one stroke, but they will of course unsubscribe anyone who gets in touch and asks to be taken off.

We're extremely sorry about this and promise to do everything we can to ensure it won't happen again.

Hi Rowan OP here :)

Glad to hear that you've got to the bottom of it and no real harm done - human error happens and there but for the grace etc etc.

Thanks for getting back to me.

Thanks very much Juan for being so understanding

Ouch. Data Protection on the next training day agenda then?

@HoratiaDrelincourt

Ouch. Data Protection on the next training day agenda then?

Oh dear. If I'd known I was going to put you all through that, I'd never have mentioned it!

For anyone wanting to maintain some degree of privacy (but still enter competitions etc), it might be worth mentioning a free service called
SpamGourmet.com

Basic idea is that you register an account/username and then tell the service where to forward your e-mails. The service limits the number of messages that get forwarded to you (and the sender never knows if your e-mail address is with Yahoo! or Live.co.uk or GMail, etc).

You can provide a "whitelist" (domains or mail addresses that are 'always' allowed) but any messages from senders which have not be given this free pass, decrement a counter. When that counter reaches 0, no more unexpected mail comes through.

You create the mail addresses and the number to allow through (eg 5 to 20... 20 is the maximum even if you use a larger number). I tend to use a short name for the website and often add the year. Some examples:

mumsnet.2010.myname @ spamgourmet.com

asdastore.2013.myname @ spamgourmet.com

In both cases, only 20 messages would get through, but it's easy to add a permitted sender (eg [email protected] ) so the counter does not go down for those mail messages.

It's also possible to use other domain names run by spamgourmet... eg ... @ dfgh.net (short and fast to type, and no clue it is spamgourmet.com)

A few web sites cough when they see a mail address of text . number . text @ domain and may report some other error message, but typically it seems it's because they only expect to see firstname . lastname and get confused by 2 x "."

I use a different mail address for almost every website I use (and rarely do any of them have my 'real' GMail address), and if a site is ever hacked and mail addresses stolen, then after a small number of junk mails, anything more will be eaten by SpamGourmet and I don't know it was even sent out!

Similarly, I use something@mydomain - so for example I might sign up to LoveFilm with [email protected] (not real, but representative). Then when I get spam to lovefilm@ I know who sold me out.

One could combine the systems by setting a rule that something@horatia would forward to something.horatia@spamcatcherdomain. That would further obscure the tricks in use!

dp has his own domain and does the same thing. if he has to give his email address he gives tgem [email protected]