I wouldn’t normally bother to publish something like this, but the attitude that John Burns, Monster’s Business Development Manager in Ireland is shocking, and I think is worth drawing attention to.

To summarise what happened, Monster.ie harvested a list of email addresses of members of IT@Cork members and used it to send an unsolicited, spammy mail to. He then tried to “recall” the mail (which only works with clients like Microsoft’s Outlook which are insecure enough to accept a request to delete a mail from your mailbox), again exposing everyone’s email addresses by not using the BCC field.

Now this alone wouldn’t be a massive deal – some of the recipients stated their disapproval of this, and if John Burns had done the appropriate thing and apologised, I’m sure it would have all been forgotten about. However, he did exactly the opposite: he demanded that one of the IT@Cork members remove his name from their blog post and “replace it with somebody else’s”, and threatened legal action in a voicemail and emails to at least one of the IT@Cork members involved.

Just to stir up the farce a bit more, somebody using Monster’s IP range (so almost certainly a Monster employee) has been posting immature and abusive comments on the blogs of the IT@Cork members – see some of the comments by "Pedro" on this post, and this one, and probably others.

More info can be found in the following posts by: Tom Raftery, Michele Neylon (not Michelle, as the abusive commenter Pedro kept calling him), Donncha O’Caoimh, Damien Mulley and James Galvin.

And all this just months after a security breach at Monster led to personal information of 1.6 million Monster users being leaked – the last thing they need to be doing is tarnishing their name with poor business practices and PR like this.

There’s currently a story on Digg.com about this.