Alexander fanatique* Thomas

After receiving spam mails on an email address which is exclusively used for communicating with threadless, I wrote the following mail to them:

Hello Threadless, when ordering stuff over the internet I usually use email addresses which carry the name of the shop I order at so I can easily remember which is the right address. At the same time it means that such an address is used exclusively to communicate to this particular shop! This is why I’m quite confused (and annoyed) that today I received spam on the address threadless@xxx.xxx! The title of the mail is “New P.D.F Reader For Windows And Mac” and it is a mail trying to make me download some software. From my point of view this looks very much like you’ve sold my email address – and that would be more than ugly. Unless you have a really good explanation for that one, I’m going to stop buying at your shop immediately – which would be a pitty because I really love the shirts. So c’mon! I’m waiting for an appropriate reaction. Yours quite frustrated, Alex

Like I wrote in the mail, I’m waiting for a reaction and will post any update here. Let’s see what is going to happen.

UPDATE

I received a reaction from Threadless:

Hello Alexander!

Thanks for the information.

Unfortunately it appears that one of our vendors had an incident that allowed our email list to be compromised. We contacted the vendor as soon as we noticed there was a problem so they are aware of the issue and taking steps to fix it. It is an old vendor that we haven’t used in the last 6 months and we are working to have them purge all our records so we don’t encounter this problem again.

We take our privacy policy seriously and would never sell your information to a third party. We are doing everything we can to ensure this won’t happen again. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes you.

Have a wonderful day!

Carlie
Threadless Customer Service
Thank you for shopping at Threadless.com!

To be honest, I’m not completely sure what to think about this. The reaction is ok. They answered promptly, they took my concern serious but at the same time the explanation is not very specific and the question appears why does a third party need my email address? It is not really connected to my payment details, is it?

So their “doing everything” – like Carlie sais – should maybe include not giving customers’ private data into the hand of some third party companies. As a Threadless customer I have enough trust torwards Threadless to give them my data – but I do not know anything a bout any other service they might use – and it seems that there is not really a good reason for establishing any trust.

And the bad thing is: once a mail address is compromised there is no way to stop it so I have to delete it and use threadless2@xxx.xx.