Today I got an email from Smith Micro about VM Fusion. I have never dealt with Smith Micro, no real idea who they are. At the bottom of the email I noticed that the email had been forwarded by Sxipper.
I click on the management link and see the following page
Cool! I see that this is an email that I gave to stuffit.com back in July and they have sold it to Smith Micro. Also, I can disable getting any more email from them with the click of the button. Nice to start to get some control and knowledge about how strange items end up in my inbox!
7 comments
September 10, 2007 at 8:28 pm
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September 10, 2007 at 7:30 pm
Eric Norman
Does sxipper.net have enough data that a graph could be made of who sells email addresses to whom? That might be revealing.
September 10, 2007 at 7:42 pm
Mark
Smith-Micro is the owner of Stuffit. They purchased Allume system a couple of years ago. So your email address may was not sold to another company, it is just being used by stuffit.com for marketing now.
September 10, 2007 at 11:02 pm
We don’t have enough email yet. That would be interesting though!
September 10, 2007 at 11:05 pm
Oh. That is interesting. I did not think that there was necessarily something wrong, but I was getting email from an entity that I had not given my address to explicitly.
It will be nice in the future if the terms and conditions on which I released my data were bound to the data so that I could check to see how I had given it away.
Since I have a layer of indirection though, I can easily "take away" the data.
September 18, 2007 at 7:37 am
dilip.andrade
I have to admit that the layer of indirection is really nice… the downside being that I’m finding out that the junk that I usually get is in response to me giving out addresses to get at sites of limited value.
deleting the indirect address gives me a warm tingly feeling on the occasions where my email address has been provided without my permission.
September 18, 2007 at 8:04 am
Glad to hear that you are getting value. See that you used one to write your comment as well. Worried about me spamming you? :)