McAfee Australia leaked 971 customer e-mail addresses in a botched e-mail marketing campaign last week.

The addresses of the recipients were placed in the visible TO field instead of the BCC field.

It's an all-too-common mistake, made especially embarrassing for McAfee because it's not the first time in recent memory something like this has happened.

In July, 2009, the company accidentally attached the full contact details of 1,400 customers to a marketing mailout.

The latest e-mails to leak are those of enterprise and government contacts, not consumers.

In response to a query from Risky.Biz, McAfee released the following statement through its public relations firm Spectrum Communications:

Late last week McAfee sent an email inviting a small percentage of McAfee customers, based in New South Wales, to its Enterprise Mobility Management webinar. Due to human error and contrary to McAfee policy and procedure, the email inadvertently revealed the recipient email addresses.

This error has been investigated and we are in the process of contacting the people affected to apologise, provide information and request that recipients delete the email addresses we have shared in error.

We are taking this opportunity to remind all staff of the importance of our processes around customer communications.

This sort of thing is always so embarrassing...

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