New York Times, Not Hackers, Accidentally Spams Its Readers (Mashable)

Regardless of whether you ever subscribed to home delivery of The New York Times, you may have received an email on Wednesday that offered to give you a deal if you re-subscribe. Although some of the email's more than 8 million recipients and members of the paper's staff have suggested that the email was the result of someone outside of The Times, a spokesperson for The Times said in a statement that it was in fact the result of a simple error.

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"An email was sent earlier today from The New York Times in error," the statement said. "This email should have been sent to a very small number of subscribers, but instead was sent to a vast distribution list made up of people who had previously provided their email address to The New York Times."

Earlier on Wednesday, the New York Times twitter account had tweeted, "If you received an email today about canceling your NYT subscription, ignore it. It's not from us."

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April, this detail led some to the false conclusion that the email was a result of that security breach.

At the same time, an internal New York Times email said that the address attached to the special offer, nytimes@email.newyorktimes.com, doesn't belong to the newspaper, according to the New York Daily News. It turns out that this wasn't correct, and The Times has apologized for its error in sending the message. Although this is actually a much better scenario, as nobody's email address or other information has been compromised, it's an embarrassing one.

One Twitter user, for instance, has reacted to the incident with a NYT Spam Twitter account that spouts one-liners such as "Yo, does anyone want, like an iPad? Tooth whitening, maybe?"

In little more than an hour of existence, the account has collected followers who are reporters at The Washington Post, Associated Press, and, yes, The New York Times.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/security/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/mashable/20111228/tc_mashable/new_york_times_not_hackers_accidentally_spams_its_readers

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