I also use the unique email address trick, and have been doing it for over 10 years now. Nuance has, by far, been the worst offender I’ve ever seen for distributing your email address.

I guess I’ll give Ed McHuiggan a ring and see what he says.

I’m the VP of Global eCommerce at Nuance. I can assure you that we have never sold your email address, nor have we ever made one penny selling the email addresses of our customers.

Having said that, there is absolutely no excuse for the fact that we didn’t respond to your prior correspondence.

I’d like to help you determine what is happening here. I can tell you that we are fanatics about protecting the privacy of our customers, but as I’m sure you know there are thousands of individuals around the globe who invest a great deal of time and resources in the effort to steal email addresses. Just last week we discovered that someone using a service provider in Turkey was sending out massive amounts of Spam that included the nuance URL in the header of the email – presumably in an attempt to improve their deliverability.

I’m not sure how these spammers acquired the address that you set up, but if you could contact me I assure you we will investigate the situation. To be honest, this is not the first time that a customer who set up a unique email address has received spam targeting that address. In some cases we’ve discovered that the spammer used phishing techniques to collect the address. However there have been other instances where, despite our efforts, we have been unable to track down the source of the problem. As you can imagine, the people sending out this mail are generally not very cooperative.

I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused – and for our lack of reponse. If you could reply to mcguiggan@nuance.com I’d like to see if I could collect some information from you that will enable us to investigate the problem.

Best regards,

Ed McGuiggan