14 DAY TRIAL // Former Apprentice candidate Alex Epstein exposed the email addresses of hundreds of journalists, editors and other media representatives in UK after failing to use BCC when sending a job seeking email.
After being fired from BBC's The Apprentice by Lord Sugar, Epstein, who describes himself as an unemployed head of communications, decided to look for work at one of Britain's online publications.
He wrote a pitch and emailed it to his industry contact list of over 700 media persons.
Unfortunately, he used CC instead of BCC, a classic mistake that ended up exposing recipients' email addresses to one another.
"I’d like to pitch myself as someone who would be interested in opportunities within your publication. [...] Alex Epstein [could be] your creative business PR/Marketing agony uncle," Epstein wrote in his email.
Not only did he expose the email addresses of hundreds of people, but he also sent several copies of the same message to some of them. Many affected recipients sent back sarcastic or even mean replies, for the entire list to see.
"How do I send a mass email to a load of journalists without publishing the email addresses of everyone I send it to? Answer on a postcard please," wrote Toffsworld's Peter Toner.
"Sorry Alex, unless you can compete with Katie Price and the Reidinator, it’s a no from me too," said Virgin Media's Gurinder Toor.
Meanwhile, Derek Lock of Frommers replied that “We’re a travel company. Maybe you should leave the UK?”
Because of the incident "Alex Epstein" has became a trending topic on Twitter on Tuesday. This has led some people to sepculate that the mistake was done intentionally as a personal marketing move.
On the other hand, using CC for mass mailing is a relativey common error in the marketing industry. In Septmeber 2009, we reported about an email marketing campaign from a British ISP called Poundhost, which exposed customer email addresses in the same way.