hist-brewing: Follow-Up: I heard from Boston Beer Co. / Samuel Adams

[Bill Velek]

This morning I spoke with Kathy Wade, counsel for the Boston Beer 
Company, and she forwarded my information to their IT department; I then 
received a phone call from Jay Barry, Systems Manager at their company. 
  He explained that their company made an error yesterday while trying 
out a new estore development of some sort, and had loaded the wrong 
database using their regular email list rather than one pertaining to 
their estore.  In addition, the reason they had used an IP address 
rather than a DNS is that they they are still in the test phase and just 
hadn't gotten around to getting a domain name for that yet.  He said 
that I was correct to be concerned, under the circumstances, but that 
the email did come from the Boston Beer Company and that there is 
nothing to be worried about.  He also explained that nobody's 
information has been compromised in the least, and he apologized for the 
inconvenience.  So this was a false alarm, but I hope everyone can 
appreciate why I posted the warning, especially when a password has 
never been needed to enter either the Samuel Adams website nor the 
Boston Beer Company website, plus the use of an IP address (a classic 
trait of phishing), and that I had never made a purchase at their estore 
nor applied for a password.  It had all the signs of being a phishing 
scheme, but fortunately it was not.  Sorry for any inconvenience I've 
caused, but it's always better to err on the side of caution.

Cheers.

Bill Velek