A few months ago I gave Toyota UK an email address so they could send me a brochure. The address I used has only ever been given to Toyota - no one else knows this address.

Now I have started receiving pharmacy spam sent to the same address. It appears that someone at Toyota has sold on my address to the spammers or someone has broken into the Toyota systems and downloaded a list of emails plus whatever else they could find. Either way it's disappointing...

your own fault for giving out your email address

toyota wont send you email, instead they'll use a 3rd party company who will send the email on toyotas behalf and then send you other info

For things like brouchers and other unimportant stuff I always use a dummy address. My real address is used for people I know and trust.

[quote name='vmail' post='863222' date='Mar 8 2009, 11:52 AM']your own fault for giving out your email address[/quote]
It was a one off throwaway address - working in the anti-spam field I know never to give companies my personal address

[quote name='vmail' post='863222' date='Mar 8 2009, 11:52 AM']toyota wont send you email, instead they'll use a 3rd party company who will send the email on toyotas behalf and then send you other info[/quote]
If a 3rd party is acting on Toyotas behalf they should not be leaking email addresses to spammers. On the brochure request page of the Toyota site they say:

"As a matter of policy Toyota (GB) PLC will not allow your name to be used by other companies who have no connection with our organisation. However,
from time to time we would like to tell you about other Toyota products, services and special offers. If you would prefer not to receive this information
please tick here."

Since when did viagra become a Toyota product?!

Some how Toyota's policy has been broken in my case and presumably for many other people too.

Slightly different but I bought a brand new O2 contract phone a few weeks back through mobiles.co.uk

Received the phone on Tuesday at 9am. At 11am I started receiving mysterious calls - went to whocallsme.com to check the number and found them out to be companies selling mobile phone insurance - I'd only had the phone 2 hours and was livid that O2 had appeared to "sell" my number so quickly

Turns out that these companies auto dial thousands of new numbers (all new O2 mobiles have the same 07 prefix) so they set the diallers to dial random sequential numbers til they get a ringtone and once you answer it's put through to a sales operative. The number is repeatedly called, much to the annoyance of the owner. I answered it after owning for three hours and made a complaint, they never called me back! My point is, it wasn't actually anything to do with O2 at all.

It's my understanding that the function for spam emails is similar, bots auto-generate emails at popular free email services, like hotmail, yahoo & gmail til they find a real one. Once they do it's stored and repeatedly mailed to.

I would very much guess that you were caught out this way rather than through Toyota selling your email to an online pharmaceutical company specialising in erectyle dysfunction problems. Unless, like you say, the biggest car maker in the world has had their systems hacked....

Obviously if you feel that Toyota have gone against their own policy you are better off raising it with them directly.

[quote name='Demonic Angel' post='863277' date='Mar 8 2009, 02:13 PM']It's my understanding that the function for spam emails is similar, bots auto-generate emails at popular free email services, like hotmail, yahoo & gmail til they find a real one. Once they do it's stored and repeatedly mailed to.[/quote]
You are correct - spammers will do this as one way of reaching victims. However the address I used had a domain (the "yyy" part in xxx@yyy) which I registered myself and xxx would be very difficult to guess also. I'm not seeing any other auto-generated To addresses sent to that domain either.

[quote name='Demonic Angel' post='863277' date='Mar 8 2009, 02:13 PM']Obviously if you feel that Toyota have gone against their own policy you are better off raising it with them directly. [/quote]
If I knew who to contact I would but I very much doubt I could find that person having read on another forum one persons experience of phoning a dealer to find when the new Verso comes in. He was passed from extension to extension until eventually he reached a phone that wasn't answered.

In posting here I was hoping to stop other people from getting spammed by giving Toyota their personal email address. There is also a remote hope that someone who's in the right job at Toyota will contact me but I would be very surprised if that happened - particularly now that this has been moved to the "dead" computer forum.

I'm curious to know why this post has been moved to the computer forum. It's about Toyotas policy regarding their holding or in this case releasing of personal details. It's not about computers. If someone posted here about phone numbers as given above would that get moved too? Most things today involve computers in one form or another. Do those posts get moved to the computer forum as well? It would be a very busy forum if that happened!

I doubt very much that anybody at Toyota would want to sell your email address to spammers. Toyota do use third parties for certain marketing activities, but NOT as I understand for email

I think you ought to be directling your concerns to Toyota directly, as accusing them of giving them your email address to spammers in an open forum is not the way to go IMHO. Contact the marketing department at Toyota GB for assurances

Kingo