From looking at the various blogs following this issue, it looks like the guy took all of the email addresses from the IT@Cork member list that had been published on their site and then sent a bulk email leaving each of the email addresses exposed to everyone. The monster employee seemed oblivious to legal implications of his actions. As Tom points out he could be facing a fine of over half a million euro:

The Irish Data protection Commissioner takes a very dim view of this and has the power to levy fines of up to €3,000 per address spammed (so potentially €570,000 in this case).

The strangest thing I find in all of this is that the monster employee would have been happy if his name was replaced with someone else’s name!!! I am presuming that this was a nervous slip of the tongue and he did not actually mean to say that. I think the best approach in a situation like this is to hold your hands up in the air and admit what you did was wrong. I would be very interested to see on what legal grounds the monster employee can try to get the blog post removed as he has threatened.

The comments on Michele’s post about this are pretty entertaining. It seems another Monster employee started to leave comments on this and then say that he is not a Monster employee, even after a reverse lookup of his IP address says different. I wonder what will be the outcome of all of this?

UPDATE: Monster have sent Tom an email apologising for the email sent and have asked for ways they can make this right. Just asking a question like that would put my trust back in Monster.

I think I am going to have to implement some of the measures that Tom Raferty used to eliminate spam comments from his website. Seeing as most of the comments  are about on line gambling of some sort. I am going to try the blacklist option for the moment and see how that goes.

UPDATE:

I am going to give the spam plugin from akismet a go.