Although some of the email's more than 8 million recipients and members of the paper's staff have suggested that the email was the result of someone outside of The Times, a spokesperson for The Times said in a statement that it was in fact the result of a simple error.
"An email was sent earlier today from The New York Times in error," the statement said. "This email should have been sent to a very small number of subscribers, but instead was sent to a vast distribution list made up of people who had previously provided their email address to The New York Times."
Earlier on Wednesday, the New York Times twitter account had tweeted, "If you received an email today about canceling your NYT subscription, ignore it. It's not from us."
Some observant recipients had also pointed out that the email header lists as its origin and permitted sender an IP address owned by email marketing firm Epsilon Interactive. Because Hackers stole email addresses from Epsilon back in April, this detail led some to the false conclusion that the email was a result of that security breach.
At the same time, an internal New York Times email said that the address attached to the special offer, [email protected], doesn't belong to the newspaper, according to the New York Daily News. It turns out that this wasn't correct, and The Times has apologized for its error in sending the message. Although this is actually a much better scenario, as nobody's email address or other information has been compromised, it's an embarrassing one.
One Twitter user, for instance, has reacted to the incident with a NYT Spam Twitter account that spouts one-liners such as "Yo, does anyone want, like an iPad? Tooth whitening, maybe?"