(My apologies to those of you who are also on the mailop list and have already seen these remarks.) This isn't particularly surprising: LinkedIn are spammers. Have been since forever. They hit real addresses, fake addresses, mailing lists, spamtraps, never-existed addresses, everything. And like other dedicated spammers before them -- Spamford comes to mind -- they're quite happy to shift their abuse modality. (You'll recall that Spamford tried junk faxing, adware, etc.) This is certainly a novel approach, but it's completely in keeping with their "business philosophy". The response is what will determine whether we'll get more of this (of course with the self-serving lie that one can always "opt-out"). I do hope that the aggregate reply to this vicious attack on the privacy, security and integrity of the Internet is met with widespread firewalling and null-routing -- because if it's not, if this is actually allowed to succeed, it WILL be copied. (I'll add "and with legal action", but I'm not an attorney and thus unqualified to speak to whether litigation is appropriate or even possible.) ---rsk