I’m fed up with receiving spam. I generally don’t get much of it because I tend not to publish my email address in too many places, and I use unique email addresses with every online store or service that I sign up to. This allows me to shut down an address when it starts receiving spam.

The other advantage of this system is that it allows me to see at a glance where the email address was obtained from. I can then take the appropriate action and inform the source that spam is being sent to an address that I trusted only with them. I wrote about this at length a few weeks ago when Last.fm and LinkedIn had their subscriber databases compromised. My biggest complaint with these companies and services is not the lack of security, it’s the lack of responsiveness.

I’ve been getting a bunch more spam this week to an email address that I used exclusively to sign in to the Boss US website (which was annoying in itself because I only wanted to download a product manual and had to hand over personal details to do so). I contacted Boss (and indirectly their parent company Roland) almost 2 months ago when the first spam arrived and received the following response:

Hello Maurice,

We have forwarded your email to our webmaster for them to investigate this.

Sincerely, Roland US Product Support

It seemed like a positive reaction, but unfortunately that was the last I heard. I’ve given them a chance but they’ve not taken the opportunity to visibly react. So now I’ve decided to name and shame Boss/Roland US.

You guys have had a security breach of some description. I’ve let you know, and you’ve still not gotten back to me. I have to assume that you’ve done nothing, or you’re doing it too slow. I’m telling the world because you’re not.