In September 2009, I registered as a developer at sun.com. When doing so, I used a tagged email address, i.e., an email address part of which was unique to my registration at that site. I’ve never used that particular email address anywhere else or published it anywhere.
In January 2010, Oracle completed its acquisition of Sun. The Sun developer web sites were eventually decommissioned and are not active today. Since the completion of the acquisition, I’ve received no email at the tagged email address I gave to Sun. Until today, that is.
Today, I received this spam sent to that tagged email address:
Received: from mail.recruitingbee-agent8.com (mail.recruitingbee-agent8.com [184.172.232.199]) by jik3.kamens.brookline.ma.us (8.13.8/8.13.8) with ESMTP id p7BNER5P022529 for <[elided]>; Thu, 11 Aug 2011 19:14:27 -0400 Received: from find ([127.0.0.1]) by recruitingbee-agent8.com with MailEnable ESMTP; Thu, 11 Aug 2011 18:14:39 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 From: "Tech-centric Jobs" <noreply@recruitingbee-agent8.com> To: [elided] Date: 11 Aug 2011 18:14:39 -0500 Subject: Technology job openings Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Message-ID: <EF440C500DF841B3AE10C51197A0EA91.MAI@recruitingbee-agent8.com> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit **********************************************************************
Find the latest software & programming jobs http://www.tech-centric.net/
**********************************************************************
A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street. ~Doug Linder
The latest programming jobs are available: http://www.tech-centric.net/
If however you are not interested in exploring programming jobs at this time please optout:
http://www.recruitingbee.com/unsubscribe.aspx?email=[elided]&token=[elided]
All the best, The Health Medical Job Site 1350 E Flamingo Rd Las Vegas NV, 89119
It looks like either Oracle sold the email addresses of sun.com web site users to a third party, or somebody stole them. Neither of these casts Oracle in a particularly good light.
I am, of course, going to do my best to contact someone in Oracle who might be willing and able to look into this, but I am rather skeptical that I will have any success.
In my opinion this leak exists much longer. In 2004 I moved to a new Company and registered there. After a few day I got masses of SPAM and a few weeks later all members of the whole mailing list got SPAM. I never user mail addresses of Companies I work for to register at a web side except “metalink”.
In my opinion regular metalink users are (or where) able to get mailadresses of others. For example if you write something in a forum.
Oracle claims that they are investigating.