I am wondering how different places are getting my email address to send advertisements to me about CS-Cart products? I'm not real concerned about getting information, but I am very bothered that it appears that someone is either renting or selling my email address out there. I guess I should mention that they are not following the US rules on emails either. Does CS-Cart sell my information to people who become “preferred”? Is there maybe a setting on my profile that is showing my email contact info and I don't see it? If one of the companies I have purchased from is selling my information that that isn't cool. I'm not really for sure, but it is annoying. The sad part is the company that spammed me this morning had a website that loaded dog slow. I did confirm and they are in fact one of the companies listed as a “third party solution”.
So the spammer today claims they “chanced” upon or found our email on another site not related to CS and then found out that we used CS by going to our site, so they sent us an email. Wow, talk about finding a needle in a haystack.
So is there a way that these people are scanning our site to find out we have CS and then try to get an email contact too? No offense to the company who contacted us today, but I find the story the person said above hard to believe. Either someone out there is selling email list of people who have bought CS products or they are somehow able to spider our site and get the information.
There are various footprints which can be used to find CS-Cart powered stores. Unless, of course, you completely customise every Language variable and create SEO names for all dispatches, even then, it isn’t fool-proof to hide a CS-Cart powered store. From the list of domains created from a given foot-print, there are various software programs available to find email addresses which match the domain names. Oldest, most simple trick in the book for “I would like to buy XYZ and pay via secure Fed Ex delivery, please ship to my business acquaintance in Nigeria” spammers.
Unless you explicitly agreed to receive e-mails from any company, the emails are unsolicited mail and should be reported (to their hosting provider, ISP, SpamCop, etc) as such. I’ll always look for a link/instructions in emails sent from legit companies to cancel any sign-up I have supposedly made. Once I unsubscribe, if I get any more mail after a month or so, I’ll start reporting it as such. Online reviews are such a powerful thing for this too.
For what it’s worth, I don’t get these e-mails…but if I do, be warned, you sent your spam to the wrong guy 