Plugin Author has contacted email addresses from our site

I don’t know if this is the correct place to comment/complain about this but here is the story.

We are a running club.

We use (or used) two plugins – one to encrypt email addresses (Email Address Encoder), and one to add OG headers for posting to social media (now deactivated).

The encoder, recently updated, added an invitation to “Scan your pages to see whether all your email addresses are protected.”

I did this a while ago, but for reasons I forget, it wasn’t very satisfactory and I stopped the process.

However I have just received an email from one of our users – a race organiser whose email address is on his race page. He is not an admin and did not construct the page. Basically the email encoder plugin has emailed him (and presumably all other email addresses on other pages, but not me the webmaster) saying his email address is not encrypted:

Recently, you or someone on your team scanned the domain carnethy.com for unprotected email addresses using the page scanner on my website <https://encoder.till.im?utm_source=email-reminder&utm_medium=email&gt;

This is a friendly reminder that your email address xxxxx@carnethy.com is still listed on carnethy.com and is not protected from email-harvesting robots — which is exactly how I was able to send you this email.

(I’ve obscured the email address)

This seems to me entirely unacceptable. And makes no sense either – email me, the admin, by all means, so I can try and remedy the situation. But not our users. This is spamming. What are they to make of it?

And in fact the email address was encoded but unknown to me the Open Graph plugin adds the email address in plain text in the header, completely defeating the encryption. So I’ve deactivated the OG plugin.

Is this acceptable behaviour on the part of a plugin author?

• This topic was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by digbymaass.
• This topic was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by digbymaass.
• This topic was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by digbymaass.

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