> I just wonder if OP realized that they might be crossing a line they shouldn't be crossing, ever, while doing security research without being under contract to the party they are investigating

yeah, good question - agreed that probably a lot safer to do this with explicit permission, though like others mentioned the tradeoff is that the company can cover it all up before it's clear just how bad the problem ever was and then say "we fixed a minor issue". I wouldn't risk my neck over that, but some people might I guess.

> To me - and please correct me if I'm wrong - that reads like 'we downloaded at least parts of 10560 tables'.

To me it sounds like they downloaded one or two records each from 10,560 tables and confirmed that those records contained emails. But you're right, I'm not sure it's very clear from the description.