Today I received a press release from Reunion.com notifying me that they had successfully added a whopping 1.6 million new members in June, beating out LinkedIn according to comScore. This is nothing compared to the more 9 million added by Facebook in the same month but Reunion.com is in another class. So how did they get the boost in traffic?

As I’ve previously covered, Reunion.com spams the friends of everybody that joins the site. It encourages users to check their email contact list to see if their friends are on the site. If their friends aren’t on the site it automatically sends an email to their contact list without notifying the users. This is a standard tactic which has been used countless times including by Plaxo which initially grew their user base with aggressive spam tactics.

As I wrote earlier this month, this isn’t the only violation of privacy that Reunion.com has made. As one article put it, “Reunion.com’s privacy policy says the site ‘prohibits registration by and will not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone under 13.’ But that doesn’t address the site’s own data-gathering.”

There is a very good chance that all of these privacy violations, regardless of the company’s remarkable growth is going to result in a lawsuit. According to sources of mine, there are individuals that are looking to sue the company for overly aggressive marketing techniques. The funny thing is how public Reunion.com’s tactics are. Perhaps this is one thing that would protect them in court.

If you Google “Reunion.com”, the first page contains multiple articles referencing the company’s email spam tactics. Growth is great for the company but sacrificing user privacy and user trust to grow your company isn’t a solid long-term strategy.

Plaxo.com, the company acquired last week by Comcast for a rumored $160 million, was launched back in 2001. The company faced heavy criticism for aggressive spam techniques which used user contact lists to send out false invites to users. Reunion.com has decided to leverage a similar tactic in hopes of rapidly expanding their user base.

While the tactics have appeared to work (based on Alexa statistics), this strategy is not a long-term solution and is a quick way to lose users faster than you gain them. Take a look at the screenshot below from a search for “Reunion.com” on Summize. The majority of comments are from angry people complaining about how Reunion.com abused users’ trust.

Only one of the users thought it was a genuine email but chose not to respond to it because he prefers to communicate via Facebook and Twitter. Screw using Facebook to spread your website or application virally, you can import peoples’ Gmail contact list and spam the hell out of them! Honestly, this has to be one of the most misleading tactics for a website to leverage.

Following stagnant growth through February it appears that the site decided to take drastic measures. Unfortunately those measures are going to end up backfiring. Reunion.com staff: drop the spam tactics or witness a mass exodus from your site. Then again I’d guess that the exodus has already begun taking place as users move to Facebook.

Have you received these emails? Do you see any benefit of using these tactics?

Sample Email 1

Sample Email 2

Twitter Search Screenshot

Last night at precisely 11:30 PM EST, some computer was triggered somewhere in the world that began bombarding my site with spam emails. Within 30 minutes I had received over 3,000 spam emails. I was able to devise a system to block the spam but the bottom line is that spam is a serious problem for many of us, especially if you are a MySpace user.

When was the last time you received a friend invite from an attractive lady friend who really just wanted you to check out her cam site? It happens to all of us that are on the site and it was one of the primary reasons that many users ended up leaving the site. Well, according to News.com, one of the spammers, Sanford Wallace was ordered to turn over documents to the U.S. District Court in the Central District of California and failed to do so.

So it appears that the judgment against Wallace is simply a statement but there has been no monetary judgment as of yet. Wallace is never far from the hot seat though as he lost a number of previous suits and in one instance was “ordered by a federal court to turn over $4,089,500.” From the sounds of things it appears that Wallace is still running from the law. I’m not quite sure how Wallace is making his money but if my MySpace friend requests are any indication, he was probably selling memberships to webcam sites.

Aside from that, I’m not quite sure how some of these spammers generate money especially when they decide to bombard inboxes with thousands of messages in a relatively short span of time. While the fight against spam is nowhere near finished, this is one loss for the spammers. Unfortunately, there is no telling whether this will have any impact on future spam prevalence on the most popular social networking site on the web.