Newegg - from nerdy/geeky to spammer in just 2 business days

Wait, before you go all ‘just delete the fucking email’ on me, read this entire post.

Starts out on August 18th, 2010 - first email received to a completely unpublished alias I have at the $orkplace:

Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2010 14:46:38 -0700
From: [email protected]
To: [redacted]
Subject: Our Gift to You: Receive a WD 120GB Hard Drive when you make your first purchase!

Pretty simple eh? Message is unreadable in a text mail reader, looks dandy in HTML.

I check the headers and everything is legit - it is all from Newegg’s systems (see end of article).

So, I figure Newegg has made a mistake, and I unsubscribe via their unsubscribe link - never had a bad experience perhaps I’ll see how it goes.

Date: 18 Aug 2010 14:49:53 -0700
From: Newegg <[email protected]>
To: [redacted]
Subject: NeweggBusiness - eBlast Unsubscription Confirmation

I called into their business department to investigate this and talked to a very nice gentleman by the name of Jeffrey who was a little flustered with me (I was as well) but we traded some emails and he said he’d get back to me when he learned something.

Then today…

Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:31:13 -0700
From: [email protected]
To: [redacted same never published email alias]
Subject: Our Gift to You: Receive a WD 120GB Hard Drive when you make your first purchase!

WHAT? Newegg sends it again?

Yep! The same message, same content (some differences in tracking URLs of course), and after the unsubscribe supposedly, same basic path through their email network.

I’ll include the headers for both messages below after I am done (though I will be removing the never published email alias and other types of email address things that could be abused).

So, I sent off this second message to Jeffrey (who hadn’t gotten back to me anyway dealing with how this all happened, but it had only been ~24 hours), and his response, verbatim:

Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 17:29:14 -0700
From: "Jeffrey [redacted]" <Jeffrey[redacted]@newegg.com>
To: Mike Horwath <$work email>
Subject: RE: [[email protected]: NeweggBusiness - eBlast Unsubscription Confirmation]

Dear Mike Horwath, After checking into the issue, the email was obtained from an outside
source through a separate channel. We cannot confirm how but the email was in our database
and will be deleted in the next 48 hours. Thank you.

Your Friend from Newegg,
Jeffrey [redacted]
Senior Customer Service Agent

I am very disappointed in Newegg.

Jeffrey - thank you for getting back to me, I appreciate it.

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