What's up with the Reunion.com spam?

"You've just been added to John Doe's Reunion.com Address Book!"

"John Doe wants to connect with you! I looked for you on Reunion.com, but you weren't there..."

Any of these messages look familiar? If so, a friend of yours (or at least someone who has your email address in their address book) has fallen prey (knowingly or not) to what many say is an overly aggressive way to coerce people into joining Reunion.com's "get in touch with old friends" service. You can see a few popular complaints here and here.

What's going on? 

Reunion.com is innocuous enough for the most part, but one little feature of its signup process has obviously snared a few users unwillingly in its net. During signup, you'll see one page (see screenshot above), which asks if you'd like Reunion.com to scan your address book to "find out who's here and invite who's not." Many services will go through your address book and offer to connect you to people who are already members (think Facebook or LinkedIn), but Reunion goes one step further by sending a Reunion.com invitation email to every single person in your address book. If you've got hundreds of people in there, you might be surprised how quickly you feel the backlash of dozens of angry people who feel they've been victimized by a friend if you fill out that simple form. Reunion.com doesn't send these emails automatically or do anything surreptitiously. You have to opt-in for the address book connector to be activated. But many distracted users have obviously failed to see what they're agreeing to when they provide a user name and password for the email account to Reunion.com.

In response to various complaints, Reunion.com says (in a press release and additionally through spokesperson Pam Kulik) that it's made numerous changes in the last few weeks to the way the address book connector feature works. Here is the germane part of Kulik's response to my question about Reunion's tactics:

Members were expressing their confusion about the Address Book feature and what would happen when they entered their private email login and password (namely they could find people in their Address Book who are already members and automatically invite the rest who are not).  In response,  Reunion redesigned the page, rewrote the copy and made the opt-out link larger to tackle this head on. 

They also worked closely with TRUSTe to ensure that they continued to meet online privacy standards required for TRUSTe members, which Reunion takes seriously as well, which is why they are a member. We are in the process of writing a joint press release with TRUSTe about our work together in addressing the feedback we had received from members on this. Again, Reunion has taken this seriously and wants all of their members to know that.

The last thing they want is unhappy members or prospective members, when their membership is growing at 1 million plus per month and they are up to 40 million members.

The screenshot above shows what Reunion's new address book feature looks like. Does it go far enough in warning users what will happen if they provide their email login info? It says right there in black and white (er, blue and white) that it will "send an email invite and reminder on your behalf"... but even I wonder if I would catch that line and really, truly comprehend what it means. Fortunately, now I know better.