The newest wave in social engineering is auto-spamming all your contacts. This is when websites display text that vaguely say “Invite your friends to join this site too.” The normal practice is you enter your username and password for your webmail client and are shown all your contacts and you can choose which you think would also be interested in the site. The normal practice is a nice and helpful feature to reach out to your subset of contacts quickly.

The new nefarious and unethical tactic is upon entering your username and password every contact is immediately sent a welcome email. I’m looking at you Shelfari and Quechup when I type this. I’m also looking at every CEO, BizDev and Marketeer so desperate to show increased usage numbers that they think it’s okay to be unethical to achieve their financial dream of their start-up becoming a success.

I’m not one to share my webmail info with sites I’m new to, but in the last week I’ve gotten too many of these emails. Heck a coworker had a “sitedown” email contact which redirects to our pagers which made us think there was a site issue at midnight only to read some slimy Shelfari marketing blather. Two years ago Plaxo tried this and was resoundingly thumped in the blogosphere.

It’s rare I take the time to point out faults in the industry. But today I’m going to chastise my peers because these acts of desperation are unethical, questionably illegal (this is duping people to route spam) embarrassing to the innocent user and annoying to the unwanting recipient.

Figure out how to grow your userbase ethically or have blog entries like this show up in search results for your company names. Don’t believe me? Here are Google searches on your names: Quechup and Shelfari has been around a while, but there’s already a spam story in the top ten.