On Mon, 2011-01-24 at 10:12 +0000, Peter Lewis wrote: > <dropbox email invitation> > > On Monday 24 January 2011 10:06:18 Ray Rashif wrote: > > Guys..I don't think anyone has to tell you this but such invites are > > _always_ unintended. E-mail services have a bad tendency to > > automatically insert contacts into your friends' list, mailing list or > > not. So please, ignore e-mails like this and keep them reply-free in > > the future, so that they may just annoy people _once_. > > Call me a noob, but I don't understand why these emails get sent. I've seen a > few of them around on email lists. It seems to be that either someone uploads > their entire addressbook to a random website (doesn't seem like a clever idea) > or else gives the website their email password (very bad idea). > > What gives? > > Pete. Plenty of the more 'social'-orientated websites are linked in to the popular free emails (gmail especially). You don't give your password to the website itself, it just asks for permission to do something with your contact list (normally spam an invite to itself to everyone there). As I understand it, the website never even sees your addressbook, just uses the google-created api to send an email to everyone in it.
