Interacting with Tyk GitHub repositories is not permission to add someone to Tyk commercial newsletter lists

[mjpieters]

I'm filing this as a bug report for this project because this is the source of the problem I am reporting. My GitHub email address has been added to a Tyk newsletter list, shortly after having interacted with this repository, as well as having interacted with another TykTechnologies repo.

THIS IS NOT COOL.

I did not give permission to be added to mailinglists by reporting on issues with Tyk.

I interacted with Tyk repositories exactly two times:

• To report an issue with the Tyk gateway helm charts: When using values.redis.addr, stray newline prevents last entry from working tyk-helm-chart#139
• To make a feature request related to the circumstances that lead to the Helm issue: [TT-2821] Include storage configuration in debug log #3609

Since my email address attached to these reports is unique to GitHub, I know that I ended up on a Hubspot.com list, sporting Tyk commercial news items, because of those two interactions. Volunteers helping you improve your OSS product may well be potential customers, but volunteering our time to help you is not the same as giving you permission to add us to your mailinglist.

And while I can simply unsubscribe, as well as reporting this infraction as abusive to hubspot.com, I hereby also give you notice that this practice needs to end now. It impacts my willingness to report issues again in future should I find any, and will do so for others. It greatly undermines the trust that working with the OSS community requires.

[buger]

Hi! Thank you raising this issue! It is definitely not expected, and I agree with your point. We will address it ASAP, and if we will find that OSS emails was used in commercial newsletters, we will remove them. I can assure you it was not a strategic decision, most likely just someone thought it can be a good idea...(not), or it was an issue in some integration.

[mjpieters]

@buger thanks for the very prompt follow-up. Do let me know if there is progress on this!

[buger]

We found the source of the issue.

In order to quickly react to GH issues, we decided to integrate GitHub into our standard customer support system (Zendesk). And Zendesk by itself have integration which adds emails of users to Hubspot (to see unified flows across multiple marketing channels).

And this weird automation, e.g. Github -> Zendesk -> Hubspot, had an issue with setting opt-in marketing email flag.
We have found 96 affected emails and removed them from our email list. We're still working on a permanent fix, but should be finished in the next few days.

[buger]

Closing now since issue was fully resolved.
Affected emails was removed the same day as my last message, but the actual root cause was fixed now.