Spam, or unsolicited email, has been overwhelming the servers and in-boxes of many Net users, forcing some companies and organisations to take drastic measures to block it. Last month, Yahoo! found its stores site blacklisted by Mail Abuse Prevention System, an organisation whose lists of suspected spammers are used by other companies to block Web or email access. Holland and Andy Sernovitz, a former customer of SparkList and chief executive officer of email marketing firm GasPedal ventures, said they became aware that their lists had been compromised in early August. Both received email from people on their mailing lists saying that they had received spam. Both said they had not sold their mailing lists. Both Holland and Sernovitz, whose mailing list has some 10,000 subscribers, said they were frustrated by how Lyris responded to their reports of the compromise. The company didn't start trying to address the issue until the last several days, Holland said. "I do understand they've been extremely busy with the merger," she said. "But did they take this as seriously as they should have? No." Lyris first started receiving reports of spam being sent to recipients of its hosted mailing list in early August, Brown said. The company hired Word to the Wise "a couple days ago", he said. Still, Brown said that it was unclear from the messages sent by the company's clients that there really was a problem, especially considering how few of its customers had reported spam. "The information we've been given is pretty spotty," he said. Still, Lyris should have come forward immediately and acknowledged the problem, Sernovitz said. "Every time a high-tech company tries to hide, they always get busted," he said. "The longer they hide it, the worse it gets. People understand if you get hacked. The question is how do you respond." Ralph Wilson publishes four e-business newsletters. He suspects the two mailing lists that are hosted by Lyris were compromised. He warned his subscribers to that effect in an email message earlier this month. Wilson declined to talk about his conversations with Lyris about the compromise. But he said that his subscribers thus far had received few spam messages as a result. "I'm not saying that I'm not concerned about it," Wilson said. "I'm very concerned about it. But at this point, I don't think people are receiving huge amounts of spam as a result. That makes me feel good so far."
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someone used my email adress to claim to be
anybrand@anybrandname.com
now I have hundreds replying to me to remove from thier lists
I don't even have any lists