Quechup Warning

If you've been invited to Quechup by me, please ignore the spam. Quechup raided my address book, as Dwight Silverman explains. I received a couple of invites from people I know and trust, so I went to the site. Big mistake! I shoulda known better.

TechBlog: Spam alert! Just say no to Quechup: "Spam alert! Just say no to Quechup If you get an invitation from a friend inviting you to join a social networking site call Quechup, delete it. Joining up and making the wrong decisions in the process could result in the site spamming everyone in your address book.

Yes, Quechup is a genuine social network. But the way it acquires new members is questionable at best.

When you accept an invitation and sign up, it asks you if you'd like to find other people who may be on it by scanning your e-mail address book for people who are in the service. If you use a Web-based e-mail account -- Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo, for example -- it asks for your login information.

This is common to many social networks -- Twitter will do this, for example. But Quechup goes one step further. It automatically sends an e-mail invitation to everyone in your address book, which looks as though it came from you. It does this without warning -- essentially, spamming in your name."