Spirit One gave subscriber access to other customer’s email account

PORTLAND — Portland internet service provider Spirit One, struggling with a widespread email outage that has dragged on since September, inadvertently gave at least one subscriber access to other customers’ email accounts.

Shawn Looney, who lives in Linnton, said she wrote to Spirit One last month hoping to get her email access restored after service went down in late September. A Spirit One technical support person replied, advising her to try logging on from a different website with a newly issued password.

That initially appeared to work, according to Looney, who said she pulled up about 5,000 emails when she signed in on the new site. She didn’t recognize most of the emails and figured maybe they were spam — then spotted the name of a friend and opened that note.

Almost immediately, though, Looney realized the email she was reading wasn’t correspondence with her friend. It was private correspondence between her friend, also a Spirit One customer, and that friend’s husband. Looney then spotted a Portland General Electric bill — but it wasn’t her bill, it belonged to a different Spirit One customer.

“If I suddenly have access to all these emails then perhaps other people have access to emails by me,” Looney recalls thinking. “That’s creepy.”

Chagrined, Looney signed off and reported the incident to the Spirit One technical employee who had given her the instructions for restoring her account. He acknowledged she’d been given access to others’ emails, according to an exchange Looney forwarded to The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Spirit One chief executive John Ogden confirmed in an email Tuesday that Looney had access to other customers’ email.