Over the weekend, internet marketing message boards have been buzzing about AWeber Communications… the popular email service provider.

It seems there's a new spam connection between those who subscribe to email marketing offers and AWeber. Those who track this sort of stuff find that they're getting inundated with spam offers — and the common connection is AWeber.

The evidence seems to indicate a very simple explanation… someone accessed AWeber Communications' master database of email address, copied a percentage of these emails, and sent a bunch of pharmaceutical spam.

The spam is not coming from AWeber's emailing system, but rather from an army of email bots. But it's becoming obvious that the source of the email addresses is from AWeber Communications.

The good news is this particular spammer is going to get shut down very quickly. That's how it works. Spammers make their money quickly until they're caught (sometimes just minutes is all that's needed to make a fortune).

The bad news is this could seriously affect AWeber Communication's solid reputation.

I've known the founder (Tom Kulzer) for about 9 years. I've eaten dinner with him. If you know me, I rarely meet up with internet marketing gurus and vendors (I live way in the country and HATE traveling to the cities). And Tom is a VERY reputable guy…

… With that said, many are upset that AWeber is completely silent about this. And I get it. When my hosting company EV1 "claimed" to have a fire, my site was down for almost a week. It wasn't the outage that frustrated me, but rather the lack of communication.

Yes, this is new news. The first report of this showed up at this Warrior Forum post on Friday at just after 1 p.m. (NY time). And yes, it's the weekend. And yes, you have to be careful these days as lawyers run our lives.

With that said, AWeber Communication's blog and Facebook and Twitter accounts are totally silent about this. And this is a very bad strategy. Tom is notorious for replying to message board posts about his company in rapid fashion. But the silence on this particular issue is deafening. All Tom has to do is to recognize that there SEEMS to be an issue and he's personally looking into it. That's it. Just a one paragraph statement would fit the bill for now to let his concerned customers know he's on it.

Bad things happen to just about every business. And when bad things happen to your company, the worst thing to do is to be silent about it. It's beyond obvious that this spam is coming from AWeber… I hope Tom ignores his legal advice and gets ahead of this issue (instead of the other way around).

Update (12/21/2009 @ 7:12 p.m.): AWeber Communications updated their blog about this compromise here.