So I just had an email from one of work's rivals. It's a pretty small market at our level; above us you have the big consultancies, at the middle tier where we are there's really only a couple of other companies covering the same area competing for the same customers. It appears one of our rivals has gotten a copy of the Exchange address book, as they've slimed myself, everyone working here at the current client (including someone who is rather new, and so doesn't have his work email published anywhere) and even slimed management. What's more amusing is they listed clients that we've taken from them in the last six months and listed a particular implementation as a shining beacon of their stellar work; when I know was a complete botch job from the view of both the customer and Microsoft who managed it.

Now they're not all bad, there are a couple of people working for them that I respect, but from talking to people the last time they approached me via a recruitment agent their reputation for employee treatment is pretty bad as the quality of the work they grind out. It's a good way to drive their reputation even further downward, spamming an entire address book; I consider this rather dodgy ethically. Would you want to work for someone who tries to poach in such a way?

[27 June : Update]

Yesterday I "engaged" with the company in question's internal recruitment manager, as well as prodding one of the people I know that work there (:wave: Hi James).

It turns out that they didn't get a copy of the address list, but instead scraped LinkedIn, presumably for people currently working for my employer (I've said before my work email address isn't hard to work out, firstname.lastname@company.tld). The recruitment manager in question describes LinkedIn as "a way of contacting good people".  LinkedIn has the facility for recruitment people to contact users through their site; it keeps the email addresses of the recipients secret and, of course, charges for this. It even has the ability to add job listings.

If, as the recruitment manager says, LinkedIn is useful to their job then is short circuiting their process and depriving them of monies presumably contributed to running costs acceptable behaviour? It certainly doesn't seem that way to me.