Between 8:58 and 10:20 BST this morning we sent an email to 3,521 of you that contained the names and email addresses of 46,524 of our readers.

Obviously, this was an error. The two-stage send process that is the norm for all of our mailers was over-looked because someone was in a hurry.

We would like to offer our genuine and humble apologies for the error.

If you would like to vent at that someone, their email address is here: data@theregister.co.uk.

We are in the process of blowing the whistle on ourselves to the ICO over the matter. ®