For a long time I’ve used the habit of using custom email addresses for each online service I sign up for. I’m planning on discussing this (and some other related tactics for real world use) in my Crushing Your Head newsletter soon, but in essence all the email addresses go to one unified email box and let me figure out who is doing what. This way if one unique email address starts getting spam (or email from another party), then I know who the leaker was.

I was trolling through my spam folder and found this today:

And all the emails were being sent to an address known only to Seesmic.  I don’t actively use Seesmic (I’m a Tweetdeck and Brizzly user for now) but did sign up a while ago (and switch for a while) when Seesmic had some advances in their client that no one else had.  You’ll notice that the first spam sent was on 6/10/2009, then another on 6/22/2009, and then the barrage starts in mid December.

So what does this tell me?  Somehow Seesmic’s database has been compromised somewhere in the chain and now the email address they have for me is in the wild (UPDATE: apparently this was reported and blogged about by Seesmic here). This same thing happened to me a few years ago with an email that Ameritrade had for me.  I complained to them and they said in essence “we’re looking into it”.  A few months later a class action lawsuit was filed (not by me) and was recently settled (I think).

So what are you doing to protect your customer’s personal information?

Before you ask, no there won’t be any online archives for the mailing list.  These deals and tricks are too good to have floating out on the Internet – if that happens the deals/tricks may disappear.  So if you want to be in the know, sign up for the mailing list.

Oh, and if you’re on Twitter, you can follow crushyourhead where I’ll give more frequent tips on good deals (technology and other stuff) that you may want to jump on.

But today I noticed an addition to the tracking package page.  Apparently Amazon has included the ability to get text messages delivered based on the status of a package being delivered (they’re calling it Text Trace).

Text Track allows you to track your Amazon.com packages via text messages (SMS) sent to your mobile phone. When you sign up, important tracking updates for that package (also visible in Your Account) will be sent to your mobile phone.

So as not to annoy users, alerts will apparently be delivered only from 10am until 11pm (mine says Eastern time but I wonder if that adapts to the local time zone of each user).

On looking at this I thought it was pretty cool.  Unfortunately, I don’t do text messages (although I suppose I could get them at my GrandCentral/Google Voice number).  So I tweeted that it would be nice to get DM’s about package updates. This has been done by other services like Remember The Milk (@rememberthemilk) although given the scale of Amazon, it is definitely a different issue (@rememberthemilk has just over 3,000 followers) and would probably require some coordination with the folks at Twitter (the number of DM’s that Amazon would likely need to put out would probably overwhelm the initial API limits that Twitter has even for whitelisted developers).

The response by some was that SMS is much easier to do than Twitter DMs, which I can definitely see.  But if Twitter is becoming a new Internet protocol, then shouldn’t everyone be planning for it and figuring out how to leverage it?