Recently one of my web contact addresses for a site I maintain, started to receive the occasional spam message from various sources, not unusual because in many cases a published address will be harvested.  But none the less I occasionally check the source of the message being that a tip to a fellow ESP might save a lot of trouble for them in the future and I'd like to think they do me the same courtesy... After all we are a fairly small community its hard not to get to know most of the players on some level. But I digress...

In this case I happened across a mailer sending to a web harvested address and alerted the ESP of this account.  I alerted the ESP of this because the content of the message was so far off topic that it obviously was not a forgotten subscription by one of the other member of our web contact address. 

This ESP during this investigation of the issue obviously discussed things over with the mailer as I received a sincere sounding apology from the marketing director about how I came to be on their list.

Here is the catch...

1 - They mentioned that we have at some point exchanged email or they had purchased from our site - possibility with their kids (We don't sell anything and have no record of any user at their domain contacting us)
2 - They Managed their marketing list within Outlook then uploaded their subscribers into their ESPs service (also many personal contacts are in their Outlook address book and these were all uploaded as well)

I would caution many of the mailers our there of a small to medium size that managing your contact and subscriber files in the same manor that you handle your Personal or business contacts will not simply not scale.

Find a better way, maintain two email profiles or two different logins completely on your PC.  Better yet work with an ESP, they come in many flavours specialized for small to large business, and can accommodate any budget.  ESPs are built to maintain lists and manage data in an easy to access and safe manor and prevent this kind of mistake.