Interesting problem
In doing a routine Google for my name… I ran across a website which has my email address and too many others to count in a plain text file. The site is configured to allow browsing of all files/folders and the text file claims to be 1 of 2, and has reference to the name 1 million (1 million addresses?) The file is 9.8MB large. I haven’t done a wc -l to see how many entries there really are in this one. But the question came to mind what the best way to deal with this is? I guess my first step is contacting the site owner to have this removed? Ok – just did a cat | wc -l and there are exactly 500,000 email address in this file, what’s more I’ve stumbled across a directory that seems to have more email address information. MASSIVE AMOUNTS more for bulk mailing purposes in zipped text files categorized by service provider. (A directory for Bigfoot, hotmail, etc. for example.)
Obviously this isn’t financial information, just an email address, but I would like to have it out of their list none the less. I use spamassassin for mail filtering (and this is likely one of the reasons why I have to…) Just as a guess I would say they’re archiving as many as 100 million email addresses (assuming little overlap), some categorized by ISP, some by region. Technically there’s nothing wrong in having a large “contact list”, but in the context it seems to be used for bulk mailing. (Unsolicited if my address is included!)
Am I tilting windmills? Does anyone have any suggestions?