Esri partners (and others) scraping email addresses from user names

[Milton]

I recently joined a new organization. our usernames are our email with added letters at the end. Within days of publishing my first public featureservice I got started getting spam. I get that this is my organizations problem because of how we set up our users. I have a real problem when an Esri partner is doing this. Mind you I cannot PROVE definitively this is how they got my email address, but there is no where else they could have gotten it. I have attended no conferences or webinars using my email. Does Esri do anything about partners behaving this way?

[SimiBasu]

Hi @Milton , thank you for bringing this to our attention. We have not come across this issue before but I am investigating to see what might be causing this. 

[BlakeMorrison]

Can I suggest this issue might be caused by the people behind https://www.zoominfo.com/

I'm doing a bit of guessing, but my organisation regularly blocks calls from the ESRI websites out to this website.

@SimiBasu, Can you confirm Esri's relationship with https://www.zoominfo.com/ or any of their customers?

[SimiBasu]

Hello @BlakeMorrison @Milton , I recommend reaching out to Esri customer service, but it would also be helpful to discuss spam policies with your organization or set up blocking measures. Unfortunately, this is not something Esri Community can assist with. Thanks. 

[BlakeMorrison · Accepted solution]

@SimiBasu, This is not an acceptable response. Multiple people are having the same issue and are discussing it and confirming it with each other while also trying to narrow down the cause - that's what a forum is for. If you can't help, then get someone who can help to look at the forum post. Don't try and stifle the discussion.

Further, did you actually ever investigate this at all? Your original reply claims you would, but that was in October last year. Did you ignore this? What did you find? Clearly you didn't care enough to notify anyone.

I'd like to add to this that both tech support and yourself appear to follow a very similar script where "No one else is having this problem, it's just you. Contact someone else" is almost the only response you will get. Meaning that tech support are telling customers to use the forum, and the forum manager is telling customers to contact tech support. Ie. Everyone is pushing all problems onto someone else at all times.

What sort of bizarre behaviour is this?

[BlakeMorrison]

I was contacted in private and told that Esri Partners are listed at the following link and if I have any further issues to contact Customer Service. Just thought I'd share that information for anyone stumbling across this thread trying to track down where the spam is coming from.

https://www.esri.com/en-us/about/partners/find-partner

FWIW, www.zoominfo.com are not listed as Esri Partners and I haven't been able to work out which of these Esri Partners they are affiliated with. But they are definitely a marketing firm and definitely being called in the code of Esri's websites.