[Infowarrior] - StumbleUpon = Corporate Spammers

[Richard Forno]

A good securitygeek friend joined the free StumbleUpon service this
afternoon.

Soon after StumbleUpon spammed everyone in his address book with invitations
to sign up -- to include mailing lists, family, friends, and more. (I got 2
myself) My friend is now apologizing profusely across the Internet because
of this incident, and I feel sorry for his inconvenience on a lazy Friday
afternoon.  More importantly, as with others who get caught up in such
gimmicks, I wonder what it does to peoples' e-mail address reputation when
such services arbitrarily make their new customers look like spammers to
e-mail servers around the world....will they be blocked as a result of
multiple reports of them as 'spammers' resulting from this incident?

Not only is such "social networking spam" intolerable and completely
antithetical to common courtesy and places innocent net users at risk of
further e-mail problems down the road, but their HTML-laced message was
poorly-formatted as well.  Triple-whammy, in my view.

For those curious, according to their spam, StumbleUpon "allows you to
channel surf the internet and discover great websites and web content you
might never have found. Whether it's a website, video, picture, game, blog,
or wiki, StumbleUpon helps you find interesting stuff recommended by
like-minded people with just a single click of the Stumble! button."

Sounds *totally* awesome......that is, of course, if you don't mind your
contact list being harvested and used for spamming purposes (and who knows
what else) first.

Be warned -- use StumbleUpon and other such techno-cretin companies at your
own risk!

-Rick