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Sainsbury's spams its way into mobile phone market

You pay monkeys you get peanuts...

UK supermarket chain Sainsbury's appears to have committed the cardinal netiquette error of spamming. An unsolicited email apparently sent on behalf of "Sainsbury's Mobile" (which is not as far as we can make out an operation that has yet entirely gone public) has been received by numbers of Usenet old lags smart enough to have an email address they use specifically, and only, for Usenet postings.

QED, if you get an email sent to that address, somebody just scooped it and all of the other addresses they could off of Usenet. The sample spams forwarded to The Register are, frankly, far too complicated for this to be a hoax that is entirely unconnected to Sainsbury's. If you're capable of doing a free Nokia 3310, pages and pages of supporting Ts & Cs, online sign-on and take the money and you're not Sainsbury's, OK, shoot us now, we're too baffled to live.

By a miraculous coincidence, the complaints about the Sainsbury's spam were swiftly followed up by similar claims about Virgin Wines; same deal, same originating domain (peel.com, since you ask), same Usenet-only target email address. It just crosses our mind that Virgin, which is a keen vendor of mobile services in the UK, might in some way have a supplier connection with Sainsbury's Mobile.

We asked Sainsbury's Mobile for an explanation, but they seem not to have got back to us, so we'll have to speculate. Did a major UK supermarket chain knowingly scoop email addresses off Usenet and spam people? Don't be ridiculous. Did a major UK supermarket chain knowingly buy a '400 billion genuine email addresses' list and spam it? Again, silly.

Did a major UK supermarket chain commission skilled marketing specialists to do a tightly-targeted mailshot to relevant consumers likely to respond positively? Um, maybe... Did said marketing specialists wind up using a list not entirely unadjacent to the ones that consist of "400 billion gemuine email addresses"? Oh dear... ®

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