The cleanup act
Phew, I deleted over 200 email addresses that got added to my contact list. In Gmail, whenever you reply to any email address, it gets added to your list of contacts. This is generally a good feature, provided you’re careful with it. I just had my foot in my mouth when I inadvertently sent a mass invite yesterday. I’m such a careful user and yet such a thing could happen if you’re not too careful. You’ll put your reputation on the line when you pull such an involuntary stunt. Thanks to my blog, I’m able to say my heart out and apologize for the folly.
David pointed out to me that Address book service providers could be fishers (who go after contact addresses and your details in order to spam you). I’m aware of that and, David thanks for the heads-up. But I’ll give Ringo a benefit of doubt as they claim to be a division of the famous Monster.com, a service that I’ve used in the past and have been happy with its privacy policy. But, just to confirm, I did shoot an email to Monster.com to check if Ringo.com indeed is part of them. I’ll post the update here as I find out more from Monster. I’m doing this because I feel responsible.
Update: It appears that Ringo is indeed registered under Monster. I just did a whois look up and it shows Monster’s registered address as below:
Monster Worldwide, Inc.
5 Clock Tower Place, Suite 500
Maynard, MA 01754
US
+1.9784618000 Fax: +1.9784618100
Update 2: Further to this, I received this email reply from Monster Support:
Chetan,
Ringo is a division of Tickle, which is a division of Monster Worldwide. Here is a link to the press release.
What do I make of this? Well, for one: your email addresses are in safe hands. I’ve used Monster since 1999 when it became the No.1 job listing service in PC Magazine’s review. I believe they continue to keep that quality and more importantly, they keep the trust that is essential in providing a service such as this.