Trade Me Seeks Legal Advice On Spam

Earlier this week Trade Me was made aware of a major unsolicited email sent by a rival online auction site to its members. The email was sent after the rival auction site, which sells Macintosh computers, debuted earlier in the week.

The breach was made possible after the people behind the site manually or programatically harvested some 12,000 email addresses off the Trade Me site before February this year. In February, Trade Me moved to protect users' email addresses from being harvested by moving to usernames.

"We are surprised at the attack , given those involved also operate an ISP and should be familiar with Internet protocol regarding unsolicited email" Managing Director Sam Morgan says. "We are totally committed to protecting both our users privacy and the market position we have worked so hard to achieve" Morgan says. "We are not afraid of the competition they present but more the way they are going about competing."

Trade Me is taking legal advice on the matter and will decide how to proceed early next week. Trade Me currently has over 50,000 registered members and is New Zealand's largest online auction site.

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