I was a satisfied customer for a few years. I ordered perhaps a book or two every year and was happy to get these out of print books without a hassle for a decent prize. What changed?

A few weeks ago abebooks started spamming me with special offers for textbooks and other crap. 7 mails since August 19th. This morning after the seventh mail I decided to check if there is a no-spam checkbox in my account. I tried to log into abebooks.com and got a “this account does not exist” error. Hm, tried abebooks.de, which looks identical but seems to have a different set of accounts. After a failed login I selected “I forgot my password” to reset it. After a minute I received a email but unlike other sites it contained my password in plain text instead of a link to reset it to a random password. And I couldn’t find a setting to stop them from spamming me, either.

Well, this much professionalism leaves me with no choice: randomize password and remove entry for the abebooks email address from my exim config.

What’s strange, this spamming started right after amazon announced that they will acquire abebooks. Any conspiracy theorist out there who can make sense of this?