The recent hacking of Film Threat’s e-mail list made the trades with a piece in Monday’s Daily Variety. While we continue to wipe off the egg on our face and build our own listserv, enough time has passed that we can simply laugh at this now. They say there is no such thing as bad press, so here is the original story as it appeared in Variety:
Inside Move: Hacker hawks Roberts bio ^ Film Threat site spams 89,000 subscribers^ By DAVID BLOOM ^ Daily Variety 7/29/02
There are spam emails, and then there’s spam sent by someone you don’t know, using your name, trying to sell something to your list of email subscribers. ^ That’s what Chris Gore saw when an email arrived from FilmThreat.com’s mailing list, touting a Julia Roberts bio to the list’s 89,000 subscribers. ^ Gore, Film Threat’s publisher, knew he hadn’t sent the ad for “a self-published, pretty bad” and “pathetic” book. ^ Even odder, of course, was that mainstream mega-star Roberts is an unlikely object of interest to FilmThreat’s diehard indie fans. ^ Gore sent an apology to subscribers, about 50 of whom had complained. ^ “Some people were more offended by my long-winded apology than by the original email,” Gore says. ^ To make matters worse, a complaint letter he meant to send only to Yahoo, which hosts the mailing list, also went to all his subs — along with his home phone number. ^ Only one person, “Scott from Sony,” called Gore’s number to razz him. ^ “That’s two Sony owes me now: one for that call and one for ‘Men in Black 2,'” Gore said. ^ After several days, Yahoo still hadn’t tracked down the hack, but Gore says he will transfer his group from the free Yahoo service to a list-serv program that will run through his Web site.
