all major US carriers received text messages overnight that appear to have been sent around Valentine's Day 2019

[sean at donelan.com (Sean Donelan)]

On Fri, 8 Nov 2019, Jared Mauch wrote:
> I run mailing lists.  Iâ??ve had times where I find something stuck in 
> the system and instead of just deleting it, I actually try to make sure 
> it goes out based on the original intent.  This has resulted in me 
> sending out e-mails a year or two later at times.

Ok, you run mailing lists mostly on an amatuer (personal, unpaid) basis.

Every commercial organization delivering customer records should have a 
record retention/archive schedule.  Holding on to customer data longer 
than necessary for business purposes is just increasing your liability 
when something goes wrong.  And it always goes wrong.

Many tech startup companies never think about record retention schedules, 
or their privacy policy says 'indefinitely', which means the lawyer wrote
something down in the policy but no one really thought about it.

Western Union learned that lesson with telegrams a hundred years ago.
Tech firms keep re-learning old lessons, the hard way.