Breached E-Mail Marketer Sends Billions of E-Mails a Year

06.04.2011
The brought a little-known but hugely influential e-mail marketer into the public eye. If you'd heard of before Friday, you're in the minority--and yet the Dallas-based "permission-based marketer" sends on behalf of 2,500 client brands, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Forty billion marketing e-mails! That's about six pieces for every person on the planet.

Who those brands are--two of the three largest banks in America, its biggest drugstore chain and supermarket, the administrator of the SAT, among dozens of others--has resurrected public fears around Internet-based commerce. Who has my information? What are they doing with it? Do I really need--or even read--e-mail from my supermarket?

Here's what's new:

It's probably best not to click through links in e-mail from any commercial enterprise, or dial any phone number in an e-mail either. Go to the company's Web page, use a link you have bookmarked, or get out the Yellow Pages, pick up the telephone, and call.

The data haul includes some vulnerable folks: High school students ( was affected), the unemployed (Robert Half International, ditto), retirees (TIAA-CREF, ditto) and people who wear alligator shirts (, ).