Virgin Media on Wednesday offered an apology to thousands of its customers whose e-mail inbox were bombarded with spam emails, following a mailing list error.
The issue was that one of the company’s suppliers had sent a message to inform customers of changes to Google services. Anyone clicking “reply all” to the email was able to message everyone in the entire mailing list resulting in flooded customer inbox.
The users entering this mailing chain through hitting “reply all” will also have their email addresses revealed to the entire mailing list.
Virgin media which currently has 135,000 Virgin.net email subscribers, said the glitch affected only a small portion of their customers and the cause of the glitch is being investigated.
The company in a statement published on its website said “Virgin Media are working to resolve the problem. We understand that continual emails are being sent out.”
The affected users took the matter to social networking site Twitter to complain about the e-mail distribution glitch. Some of the users reported they received more than 700 spam emails, while some posted pics of their mailbox.
A Virgin Media spokeswoman insisted that not all users are affected and said “A small proportion of our customers have received an email from one of our suppliers which, if they reply-all, it is sent to a wider group.”
“We’re investigating exactly what has happened and, in the meantime, advise people not to respond to this email. We apologise for the inconvenience caused.”
