I knew it could happen, I’ve seen it happen, I was watching out for it.
Despite all that, I just invited my entire addressbook to linkedin. After scowling at how everyone was selected by default and how there was no way to select only people who currently have accounts, I carefully went through the list and selected a small number of people. When I hit the send invitation button, the page re-loaded and told me I had to confirm my email address first, which I did, in a separate window. Then I hit the send button again, and IT SENT THE GODDAMN INVITE TO EVERYBODY IN THE WHOLE ADDRESS BOOK MAKING ME LOOK LIKE A GODDAMN N00B!
I knew something like this could happen, I was watching out for it, and they still got me! The bastards!
On a positive note, I did take the precaution of creating a special forwarding-only address just for them, so I could redirect the forward to the trash if that becomes necessary. Half the emails bounced anyways.
LOL, I can certainly empathise with that William, as it has happened to me on Plaxo and StumbleUpon after carefully selecting a few people they both spammed my whole address book much in the same manner you describe. Arrrrgh!
I could almost here the wails of several thousand bemused people on opening their inbox the next morning 🙁
I managed to prevent Plaxo from getting me, so I thought I could do that here too. I got many bounce messages, several “WTF is this?” messages, and a couple, “Oh, long time no see” messages. It’s so embarrassing and really unprofessional that I just can’t believe they have that as default behavior.