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Tagged.com's newest trick
I signed up a disposable address at tagged.com last summer, to see how their signup process went and how aggressive they were at marketing.
They mailed me maybe a dozen times over the course of a month and then the mail stopped.
Until today.
Today I got two messages from tagged.com, one from Sophia C (33) and one from Melinda E (27). The messages are identical except for the names and some of the advertising on the bottom.
I find it a bit coincidental that after all the recent news about Tagged that I start getting mail from them again. Mail that is not from anyone I know. Mail attempting to entice me into logging back into the tagged site.
Are these emails from different people?
What do you think?
Laura
First – thank you for covering Tagged. We have made significant enhancements to our registration and email invitation process and we are eager to get the word out about this fact and clear up any misunderstandings from the past.
I want to assure you and your readers that Tagged is committed to a positive user experience for our members and their friends. This is supported by the fact that we have millions of active and engaged members using Tagged everyday.
The emails you have written about in your post are not from Tagged but rather “message spam”. Unfortunately this issue is fairly commonplace on all large social networks including Facebook and MySpace. We work hard to prevent these unauthorized emails from being sent, however, they sometimes slip through. We apologize for the inconvenience and are investigating these particular ones from your post now to disable the accounts and prevent further intrusions.
This is similar to the type of spam issues you recently wrote about where Tagged won a lawsuit against a spammer.
http://blog.wordtothewise.com/2010/02/tagged-com-wins-against-spammer/
If you have any further questions or concerns I invite you to contact me. We’d be delighted to review our processes and introduce you to the initiatives we are taking to ensure social networking industry best practices.
Thank you again for your interest in Tagged.
You mentioned that you used a disposable email, what service did you use and is there anything they could have done better? I’m a developer for a disposable email address service, and I’m always interested in real life uses. This type of a situation is a perfect use case. You should be allowed to try out services and companies that you don’t know like tagged.com without having to give them any personal information. Anywhoo, keep shining the light on suspected spammers, and if you have any questions or comments, let us know!!
We have our own disposable address system that’s tailored to our specific needs. I’m sure the commercial services are good, but I really need to have a lot of control over incoming mail delivery and email display.
I’m using tagged for a while. I noticed a patern in receiving the spam mails. The volume always goes up, if I:
1. view the profile of the person
2. person has self-added content (widgets, photos, etc.)
I would guess there is a code somewhere in the content to retrieve my ID and that causes the other “meet me” mail to appear. I guess it’s some porn web-site coding.
just a thought,
pete