If you go to their web site, looking at the "business side", it looks kind of scary. Looks like they sell services to spammers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlegitimate opt-in direct-email marketers, to allow them to track users that change e-mail addresses. Their form for consumers to enter their "old" and "new" e-mail addresses into a form on that page, strikes me as odd too. I guess they use that to update their mass e-mailing databases, because they certainly can't offer a forwarding service without the appropriate password to retrieve mail from one of those accounts/mailboxes.
My guess? Yet another spammer or spammer sub-contractor, trying to appear legit, and trying to find out if your new e-mail address is related to the old. I wouldn't be surprised to find some sort of tracking mechanism in the e-mail that they have sent you. If you didn't knowingly sign up for their services, then I would assume wholeheartedly that it is some sort of commercial spam.
Edit: Ok, maybe I'm totally wrong, they do offer personal forwarding services, and do ask for your old e-mail password. Forwarding services works with active accounts, for AOL, MSN, Hotmail, Yahoo, and generic POP3 access. They also seem to have some marketing affiliation with Comcast and Verizon.
http://www.returnpath.net/forwarding/
Is it possible that your ISP sends all e-mail changes to this company automatically, as a "service" to you?
(Interestingly, I'm on VOL DSL myself, I'll have to check to see if they're doing this too. I hope not.)
It appears that anyone can search their "e-mail change-of-address database", using one of your old e-mails as a key, and find your new, current e-mail address. That just sounds too much like spammer-heaven to me.
🙁 (The top reasons that people change e-mail addresses, are to run away from mounting volumes of spam.)
Thanks for the interesting heads-up, I wonder if the folks over at DSLR have heard about this yet.
PS. If you want an easy-to-use, disposable e-mail, check out mailinator.com. (No affiliation.)
Edit 2: After reading the first few entries in their FAQ under tech-support, they claim to require your permission to send your current up-to-date e-mail address to those requesting it who only have an older e-mail address. The service also claims to be free for end-users, but they charge for businesses who want your updated e-mail contact info.
Edit 3: I don't know what to think about this site. On one hand, it looks like a useful service, for end-users, to allow other users to request their updated e-mail contact info, though a "neutral" intermediary. Yet, on their home page, their ad-copy for businesses is way scary, using phrases like "optimize deliverability rates", "increase response rates"... heck, just using the phrase "e-mail marketers" is scary enough for me. The fact that they have both the Truste and BBBOnline logos prominently displayed on their homepage just
screamsshyster to me. Yet they also have a logo that claims that they are the official e-mail change-of-address service for the USPS's "moversguide" site. That sounds almost halfway legit.
I would love to allow possible contact by someone that only had my old e-mail address, but I'll be darned if I hand over my entire e-mail address history to a company that probably works hand-in-hand with spammers.
I just thought of something else too - what about overlapping e-mail addresses? What happens when someone requests updated contact info, from someone that had a certain address, but someone else had that same address at a later date? Do they send the requests to the current e-mail addresses registered for both? What if the person requesting the update, only knows of one of the holders of that address, but the *other* holder is the one that entered their updated contact info into ReturnPath's database? That could be downright misleading, and a threat to identity in and of itself! The very existance of this service, due to lack of futher authentication mechanisms, is dangerous!
