Follow-up…
I just spoke with one of the HippoJo owners and asked her if she knew there was an email issue. She was unaware of this, so she went straight to her Aff Manager, who explained that she culled the internet to develop a list of affiliates to send an email to. Rather than email each affiliate individually, she put this list together and gave it to the tech to send the piece out as a bulk emailing. This is where the problem came in. The tech responded with the following:
We have written our own mass email routines and our test only used one channel of a possible 256 to send emails out through. So our tests looked fine. Then we sent the main email out, and the guys allocated 15 channels to sending the emails. Instead of the total number of emails being divided up across the 15 channels, every email went out through each of the 15 channels – hence they received 15 copies
So there you have it. As suspected, it was no more than a mistake and management is now aware of this and no doubt scrambling to rectify and prevent future incidents.