You do not mass email people with a BCC to find a cofounder. You find someone you like individually and write a response to them based on the strengths in them that you saw.
Finding a co-founder should be treated with as much care as dating.
Sending spam to me via the cofounder list makes your idea, company, and any/all entities you so much as breathe on get the instant waste basket.
I don't know what's happened since 2000 to make people believe spam is somehow acceptable when there's an individual rubber-stamped on the front of it. Being a "startup" doesn't excuse spam either.
Let alone the efficacy of it.
This is like mass emailing women on craigslist trying to get an easy lay, except being stupid enough to mass-email them all at once instead of serially, and then they get into a reply-all mess.
There is a lack of consideration and ignorance present at every possible dimension of what you did that I don't begin to have time or patience to enumerate here.
Very bad form, the only good thing you could've done is "Sorry, I boned up, won't happen again.", instead you act like an adolescent and try to defend your rude behavior.
I doubt I'm the only person who got emailed who feels this way. Do I need to publish the reply-all furor in this thread to demonstrate that I'm not alone in being disturbed by this or are you going to apologize?
Note: this isn't the first time someone's made this mistake, just the first time they've had the cajones to follow it up with
1. A post on HN
2. Trying to defend their spam in a comment reply
As for removing my information, most people are sufficiently socially aware enough to send me a personal email. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't stop the propagation of my personal information as there are many web apps and clones of that info all over the internet that I have zero control over.
You might as well tell EA to go pull all the pirated copies of their software.