Reporting at [e-mail]

Someone placed the address [e-mail] in our mailing list!

[Catnip]

I just sent out emails to our mailing list and to my surprise I got an email back from Google! Turns out some a$$%@!* put [e-mail] in our mailing list. We have a small form on our website and someone put that address in it. I'm assuming it was one of our competitors. Is one email to that address going to make anyone at Google upset? Should I send them and email? Please help.

<snip>

As you can see this really sucks, I finally get to a PR6 and now this happens. I think I should start by writing them an email and explaining the situation. Any help from GG would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Ryan

[edited by: ciml at 5:08 pm (utc) on Jan. 8, 2003]
[edit reason] No email quotes please. See ToS#9. [/edit]

[martinibuster]

Sucks. Is funny from a distance. But sucks.

They'll probably just trash the letter.

[ciml]

Hopefully they'll just realise that someone subscribed them. I bet it happens a lot.

[Nick_W]

Didnt they say in that froogle page that they'd be happy to recieve mail from diposed nigerian dictators? ;)

Nick

[amoore]

Apparently you don't send a confirmation mail to addresses that are subscribed to your mailing list. That's pretty negligent. I recommed that you start doing that. There is tons of software to let you do that easily around, and much of it is free like mailman from list.org. You should probably do this rather quickly before you suffer concequences worse than just getting Google mad at you.

[Catnip]

Thanks guys for the Reply's except Nick_W, just joking.

Well I emailed Google explaining what happened hopefully they will understand. Also after looking everything over it seemed to come from a service that we had so current members could email other property owners that they know about our service. The addresses were stored in the database and then were emailed them out every 15 days or so. They were supposed to be checked before sending, but somehow it got through. Also we HAD a tell a friend service that went directly to the email you entered with your email and your name it was on our homepage, but after this episode we just took that down also.
Once our main programmer gets back from holidays we will add some sort of security to such services Amoore.

Thanks again everyone,

Ryan

[jomaxx]

Ditto on Amoore's recommendation. Force the recipient to opt in or you will have more spam troubles.

[Catnip]

Oh thank God.....

Hi Ryan,

Thanks sincerely for your consideration. Google does not in fact, have interest in vacation rentals at this time. Our spam filters caught the original message you refer to. Thanks again for your regard.

Cheers,
The Google Team

[EliteWeb]

Wow that all but too funny :D I have a little shell script i use to go through some of the domains i watch so i dont send out emails to the wrong people for whatever reason. another good method to to VERIFY the address like they have to confirm before its added.

[Catnip]

EliteWeb,

Yeah it was a real blast :).. But I can see the humor from the outside. Yeah we are fixing it. I had flashes of a grayed out PageRank bar, not fun at all.

I will probably still have some scary dreams tonight!

Thanks for all your comments,

Ryan