Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2010/04/20/ecrm_people/

UK IT job outfit punts 491 private email addys

Yeah, I'll just stick the database in the 'To:' field

By Lester Haines

Posted in On-Prem, 20th April 2010 09:13 GMT

UK IT recruitment outfit ecrm people has pulled off a bit of blinder by exposing the email addresses of what appears to be its entire mailing list of potential candidates for a Senior Web Developer post in London.

The missive, suitably censored here to protect the innocent, begins:

From: Ross Miller [mailto:Ross.Miller@ecrmpeople.com]
Sent: 19 April 2010 17:03
To: K-----, Alex; O-----, Mark; J-----, Michal; W-----, Moses; N-----, Hemal; M-----, Jack; R-----, Amit; P-----, Patrick; F-----, Peter S; R-----, Andrew; D-----, Ian; E-----, Anthony; M-----, Anthony; R-----, Adam; W-----, Andy; K-----, Sunil; B-----, Demuel; R-----, Alex; L-----, Rob Shan; F-----, Muhammad; G-----, Jeremy; S-----, Uday; J-----, Harshit; S-----, Matthew; G-----, Pete; S-----, Jamie; B-----, Mark; P-----, Hashin; I-----, Saqib; L-----, Brooke; P-----, John; H-----, Kristoffer; S-----, Grzegorz; W-----, James; P-----, Joe; S-----, Salman; S-----, Warren; R-----l, David; M-----, Richard; B-----, Harry; B-----,...

And so it goes on, for 491 contacts, all with their email addys laid bare. One disgruntled recipient replied to Ross Miller: "Hi, I assume these are all the web developers you have on your books? Could you please remove me from your mailing list."

ecrm people trumpets itself as "a true world leader in the provision of IT talent and staffing solutions within its core markets". It'd probably do well to trawl its IT talent for a data protection staffing solution, and sharpish. ®

Bootnote

The email ends with the usual extended disclaimer, which includes this gem:

The contents of this e-mail and any attachments to it are strictly confidential, may contain information or data which is private or proprietary to the Interquest Group, and is intended for the recipient(s) only. If an addressing or transmission error has misdirected this e-mail to you, you may not under any circumstances disclose, distribute, forward to any third party, print, copy or use this email (or any attachments hereto) for any purpose, and we request that you please (a) notify the author by replying to this e-mail; and (b) destroy this email immediately.

Well, we were going to destroy the email, but then decided to call in Gwent Police's top data protection operatives to do the job for us.

Bootnote 2

ecrm people's MD Steve Morrisey has been in touch to explain that the mass mail out was down to a technical error with the company's database, which meant the contacts were not included in the BCC field.

He said he would send a personal email explaining the error and apologising to each of the unwitting recipients by the end of the day.

Secondly, I concede that we could have minimised the impact here by Ross running a more effective/appropriate search (491 candidates is not a finely tuned search!), however as he is new to the job (less than a month in) I am willing to accept a level of inexperience here (rest assured this is a lesson he is learning the hard way!) - we were all trainee's once.