Evite, spam, and spyware

I only give away my SFU email address to people that I know and trust, and use another email account for things that I sign up for, or to subscribe newsletters to. When my friend wanted to send me an Evite, she could only find my SFU email address, and so she used it to send me the invitation to her party. Thinking that Evite would be ok as a site that I could trust, I didn't think much of it, until I started to receive spam.

I am quite paranoid about spam, thinking that they all contain viruses that want to attack my computer, so I don't open them and delete them right away. SFU's spam function in webmail does a good job of filtering it out of my Inbox. However, I'm noticing that I STILL receive a lot of spam and all I can do is spend time in my life to click and delete these unwanted emails! Ok fine, it's just a few seconds of your life, no biggie. But think, it takes about 3 secs to delete spam, and let's say i check email once a day. So, 3 seconds times 365 days in a year = 1095 seconds, which is about 18 minutes a year! I started using Evite during my first year, and my email account last for a year after I graduate. So 5 years at SFU plus an extra year is 6 years. 1095 seconds times 6 years is 6570 seconds, which is 109.5minutes or almost two hours! That's two hours in my university life wasted to deleting spam.

At first, I didn't realize it was Evite because it thought someone somehow got a hold of my SFU email address. But even now, in my 4th year of university, I still only give away my email to people I know and trust. It was not until a read in an article for my assignment 2 that I realized the cause of these spam could be because of Evite. The author in the article (available at http://ydr.com/story/technology/34708) points out that one of the biggest reason why she did not use Evite to invite guests to her wedding was becuase "it loads a lot of spyware on your PC and and then I'd get lots of pop-up ads".

I did a little researching about this disclourse of information and found this on their Privacy Policy section, "Evite does not sell, share or otherwise provide any "Personally Identifiable Information" you give to us with any Business Partner without your consent"
(http://www.evite.com/pages/custservice/privacy.jsp). By "Personally Identifiable Information" they mean name, email, address, etc. The problem with this statement is that it does not include individuals or organizations that not Evite's Business Partner. The rest of the Privacy Policy only talks about not disclosing info to other business partner, affiliations, and other users, but does not talk about people who do not use Evite, people who are not affliated, and people who are not Evite's business partner. Could this be a flaw in their policy? Or is this a way to balance the cost of their free service?