Spam to a unique Zen address

For pretty much any business I give an e-mail address to, I give them a unique (working) derivative of my personal email address in order to (1) make automatically filing it easier and (2) identify any leaks to spammers.

I've recently started getting spam to the address that I've got uniquely associated with Zen. I've checked that I've not ever published this address online, and I've taken steps to reassure myself that my own email hasn't been compromised by any address-harvesting nasties. So has anybody else who uses unique email addresses in this fashion noticed this with their Zen address? Is it possible that Zen have had their customer database compromised? Or might there be a less worrying explanation?

I contacted customer services by email about this last Tuesday, but haven't received any kind of reply yet.

Sh! It happens!

I do the same with my email addy and I get spam on my Emusic & Fujitsu addys; I just filter it off the server. Both organisations deny they've had any leak. Never used Zen tho'.

In reply to a post by rthrippleton:

I've recently started getting spam to the address that I've got uniquely associated with Zen. -snipped-

Hi

A similar query was raised on Zen's own customer forums here http://forum.zensupport.co.uk/2/38319/ShowThread.aspx

If you look at the reply from Jerry Nicholls on page 2 of the thread, this may answer the query you have.

Kind regards
Gary

Hmm, it's possible I suppose. I use the address "rt-zen@<my personal domain>" which doesn't fit a particularly common pattern. I've searched my spambin and haven't seen anything else of that guessed form crop up though e.g. no "rt-ebay", no "rt-amazon".

Something interesting that cropped up after doing more research; I've seen rumours that "createsend.com" got their address database compromised[1], and I believe that I've seen Zen marketing e-mails come from createsend.com before. Do I correctly infer that this is 3rd party marketing company that you use for some of your newsletters?


[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/ds0sp/ebay_d... <-- the spam on there is one of the ones I noticed going to my Zen address.

I had that exact same email sent to my [email protected] mail address (that I never give out) on the 16th of this month. I googled it back then and it seemed to be doing the rounds, but I've never had any spam reach my zen inbox in 5+ years.

I had that same email around the same time on my Zen email address (�alias�@zen.co.uk) � the only place that address is used is on the Zen Portal, for my Zen billing info and newsletter.

Hi again

You don't have your zen mail addy listed on a gmail account do you? I have recently started to get spammed on my work one a first in the 4 years I have been here and it came as a result of a compromised mail account on google that I use for forum posting - in my address book was my works e-mail address which I use to forward mails to and from on the odd occasion - never used for anything else though or by anyone else until google mailed me to say the gmail account had been hit by Chinese and my address book was bulk mailed.

No, it's not known to any other email accounts. To the best of my knowledge, that email address (rt-zen@<my personal domain>) is only recorded on my own computers, a hosting company that handles <my personal domain>, Zen's systems and any 3rd parties such as createsend.com that Zen legitimately gave my email address to.

I'll check with the hosting company I use, but I'd be surprised if anything had happened; if their logs/IMAP server got compromised (or indeed any of my own computers), I'd be seeing spam to a lot more "special" addresses such as rt-ebay/amazon/etc, which I'm not.

It's been nearly two weeks since I e-mailed customer services. And still no reply, not even a "we are investigating". This is exceedingly shoddy customer service by Zen standards.

My 2p worth.

Just thought I'd mention that as a comparatively early Zen subscriber (4-digit no.), I've long given up on actually using Zen webmail, because of the phenominal amount of spam. Never questioned it, just left it alone.

It's not really a problem for me as I have enjoyed nearly 10 years of mac.com/mobileme membership with hardly any spam.