Amazon Spam?
Posted by Pierre Igot in: TechnologyAugust 19th, 2003 • 5:57 am
I am a long-time customer of Amazon.com and, more recently, of their Canadian store. I’m generally quite pleased with the service. However, today I received the following email:
From: “Amazon.ca”
Date: Lund août 18, 2003 9:20:59 PM Canada/Atlantic
Subject: ORDER “The Simpsons: The Complete Third Season” Today!Greetings from Amazon.ca!
As someone who has purchased a “The Simpsons” DVD in the past, you might
like to know another episode, “The Simpsons: The Complete Third Season,”
will be released on August 26, 2003, on DVD. You can now pre-order your
copy at a savings of 30% by following the link below…
The trouble is that I’ve never ordered a Simpsons DVD in my life, either from Amazon.ca or from any other online store.
The lenient view would be that this is just a glitch in the system — I might have ordered a DVD of a movie with an actor whose last name is “Simpsons”.
The not-so-lenient view would be that these “personalized” promotional messages are getting dangerously close to good old spam…
April 2nd, 2004 at Apr 02, 04 | 2:13 pm
Dude, it’s possible to forge the From: address of an email. It
might not even have been sent by Amazon. Since you didn’t post
the full message, it’s hard to know for certain.
April 3rd, 2004 at Apr 03, 04 | 1:57 am
I know about possible forgeries and did check the legitimacy of this email before posting this item. Further proof is that Amazon replied to my complaint about this email as well.