Evite and spam

Matt Stratton | Oct 12, 2004 min read

So lately several people have been bitching at me (or in general) that by using Evite, we’re exposing their email addresses to spammers.

I call shenanigans on this.

If you look at an evite, the guests invited show up as their evite username (if they’re evite users) or just the part of the email address before the “@”.

I looked at the source HTML of an evite, and the only email address that even existed in the source was the email of the host.

I know that a while ago (probably in the last year), this was not the case – unregistered users DID have their email address show up. But that’s not true anymore.

I am going to keep using Evite. It works for what I need. But I’ll stop inviting the folks who bitch about it to my parties, if they’re erroneously concerned that the main reason they are getting spam is Evite.com. Insecure Windows boxes that let spammers harvest out of their Outlook address books are a much larger concern.

And for the one of you on my friends list who is going to think this is all about you, it’s not. Just maybe 10% about you. Congrats, you were a straw.