Harris Fellman picked the wrong day to bug me -- I'm in a bit of a ranty mood (hmm, my spellchecker doesn't like the word "ranty". I've got a few choice words for that spell checker! Just kidding.)

This morning, I got an email from Harris promoting somebody else's webinar. I clicked a URL in the email, quickly skimmed the page, and that was that.

Or so I thought.

A few minutes later, I got an email asking me to confirm my subscription to some mailing list that I'd never subscribed to. That happens periodically when somebody uses their autoresponder email address to sign up for my autoresponder. (Note to people who do that: "Don't do that!")

I checked the email address the message was addressed to to see whether that was what had happened, and to my surprise, the message had been sent to an address I'd created to subscribe to Harris' mailing list. So how did this other person get it?

I went back to the message I'd gotten from Harris, hovered over the link, and sure enough -- there in my browser's status bar I saw my name and email address embedded in the link. When I clicked the link, my email address was automatically submitted to someone else's autoresponder.

Not cool!

Granted, it's a double opt-in list, so unless I confirm (which I won't), I won't stay on the list. But even so, the other person (by the way, since I'm in a name naming mood, it's Jason Henderson) could get my email address by logging into their AWeber account and looking at who had subscribed but not confirmed.

Now that I look at the page again, I see that it explains in big bold letters to expect the subscription confirmation email. But like I said, I skimmed quickly -- I read the first few lines and then scrolled down to the videos (which I decided not to watch), so I missed the big bold message.

It could have been worse. I could have been added to a single opt-in mailing list with no notification whatsoever. But even though that's not what happened, it was still a breach of trust. When I join somebody's mailing list, I don't expect them to hand my email address out to anyone. In any way. Ever.

Reader Comment:
Antone Roundy said:
Hmm, I just looked back at another email I got (at the same address) yesterday about the webinar that was being advertised. The "from" listed Kevin Wilke, the email was signed Jason Henderson, and it was from an InfusionSoft-hosted mailing list (Harr...
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Now I like Harris, so I may not unsubscribe (unless something like this happens again). But I'm in a ranty mood (take that, spell checker!), so I'm going to say this in public: "Hey Harris, don't do that!"