AWeber Lists Stolen, but to What Effect?

Am I missing something? Try as I might, I just can’t seem to get all that worked up over the recent data breach suffered by e-mail service provider AWeber.

For those who don’t know, some unknown individual or group managed to gain access to AWeber’s clients’ e-mail lists and apparently stole some or all of the names.

“We have reason to believe that the party responsible for this was either directly or indirectly a part of an overseas organized group,” said a post on the company’s blog.

According to the post, no personal, business, or credit-card information was stolen. Moreover, the post claimed, AWeber has identified and fixed the problem.

So in essence this amounts to a situation where a spammer or a company that sells e-mail lists to spammers has one heck of a clean list—or collection of lists—assuming AWeber does its job and removes hard bounces and complainers from its clients’ files.

But what are these lists really worth to anyone but their rightful owners? I contend not much.

Sure, the lists are presumably clean and full of more responsive names than your average spammer is used to mailing. And sure, some spammer or spammers will certainly attempt to mail the names.

But then the various inbox providers and anti-spam services will surely identify the senders as spammers and treat their garbage accordingly.

So how much spam will AWeber’s clients’ subscribers receive as a result of the theft? I predict not much.

This is not to say e-mail list theft shouldn’t be taken seriously and guarded against. It’s also not to say that AWeber doesn’t have some splainin’ to do with clients.

It is, however, to say that AWeber’s clients’ subscribers probably won’t receive much more spam in their inboxes than they already receive as a result the breach and, also as a result, aWeber’s clients won’t likely suffer and real damage to their subscriber files.

And if I am missing something, please feel free to slap me upside the head in the comments section below.