[Raman]

I have a private email address that I rarely ever use. I sent an email to another private account (our corporate mobile me accounts). Tonight I received spam from AT&T on one of the accounts.

Emails were sent on iPhones and the accounts are only used for medical urgencies.

WTF?

[design219]

Doesn't mean they are reading your email. But still, a lousy practice.

[starman]

Spiders.

[residentEvil]

a) no such thing as a private email address. all are easily farmed. just because you don't put it on public forum or business cards or websites, etc...it isn't private

b) create an exception. only allow email to/from that address from the other (or multiple) address. everything else gets black holed. now, you won't get spam or any email from anything other than the exception address(s) you added.

[ghporter]

I agree with residentEvil. I once had an address that suddenly started getting tons of spam. I even accused the host of selling addresses. They explained (patiently, by the way) that my user name was WAY too short, and that bots simply used the host's name and randomly created addresses. Word to the wise: use a fairly long user name that doesn't include real words.

A whitelist in your email client ("Only allow messages from these addresses...") will basically pour anything else down the drain. The undesired stuff is all noise anyway, so that's a "good thing." Of course you must add any desired addresses BEFORE they send you anything, but for a "private" address, that's not such a problem.

[Raman]

Thanks for your inputs. We know how to block email and spam, etc. and realize that nothing is truly private when going over the public internet, unencrypted.

I guess I should have clarified. We never got spam on these accounts until shortly after we began using our iPhones to check and send emails to/from these accounts on our iPhones. The significance is that we are getting SPAM by our iPhone provider. Apparently they see fit to electronically harvest marketing information from the emails we send. If it was another company that sent us the spam then I'd be sure that somehow the email addresses got out into the "wild".

What if I send an unlisted phone number in an email? What about someone's address? Is it o.k. for my phone provider to use that information to generate sales leads, especially when the person receiving the unsolicited marketing never opted-in? What if hotmail, gmail, time warner, cox, your local phone company looked at your incoming and outgoing communications and harvested phone #'s, addresses, email's, and sent them all spam? What if your doctor's office called all of the people and addresses on the forms you filled out when you saw them and asked them to come see him/her next time they had a medical issue?

Anyway, it's still scummy if you ask me.

[reader50]

Was the advertising targeted? ie - were you offered products & services related to things you had discussed in your emails?

If AT&T is scanning your email contents, your options would be to complain to AT&T, file a complaint with the FCC, or file a lawsuit. Generally in that order, because the work & expense involved rises with the options.

Btw, if the spam is targeted, meaning they did read your emails, dig out your TOS copy. Both the current one, and the one in effect when you signed up - courts haven't been too supportive of companies that change the TOS after the fact. See if they promise in writing not to read your emails without a court order.

If the spam in not targeted, then they are just taking advantage of knowing your addresses. Besides complaining to them, your primary option would be to switch to a different ISP. Which come to think of it, is a pretty good option anyway, if they are reading your emails.