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Dean's "team" got busted several times for sending email spam.

http://www.spamvertized.org/2004/dean.html.

That was enough to worry me about him - he obviously doens't understand the internet as well as he pretends to, or he wouldn't be sending spam. I have never given a spammer my business, so he pretty much shut down his chances of my vote at that time.

But when I read this article and the transcript of Dean's talk (.PDF format), the man really truely started to scare me. Expecting everyone to use an ID card every time they use a computer, or do damn near anything else? Requiring everyone to carry a national ID card? Sorry, no thanks. The man is clueless.

Seeing your sig in this discussion reminded me that the Dean campaign has a history of sending spam.

See http://www.spamvertized.org/2004/dean-emailresults .html. The Dean campaign made an honest mistake, and fixed it.

The title of your post sums it up more accurately than you know. Dean's campaign didn't start out targeting the net - it's the net activists that came to them. Ever since then, the campaign has been going through a lot of growing pains getting themselves up to date on the technology that those supporters are demanding. And they have had a lot of success, but also the occassional failure, like this instance.

However, here's an important follow-up post linked to from one of the author's links. Seems that once Dean's campaign was notified that their partners may be less-than-credible, they investigated and terminated their relationship with them within a day. Obviously I'm biased (see my sig), but it seems like an honest mistake to me.

-j

If you had bothered to check the page that you actually link to yourself here, you had seen that this already was resolved (5 days ago by the looks of it). To quote: "After the Dean campaign was presented with clear cut evidence as to the nature of emailresponse.net, they investigated promptly and terminated their relationship with the company that same day."

I wondered about this as well, but sadly it appears that Dean did at least pay for the marketing campaign. *However*, it also appears that the campaign was duped into thinking that company they contracted with would only send mails to people who opted-in, so they were actually showing a reasonable amount of acumen, and just neglected to run a Google search on the company in question. Oops.

I'm a little unsure of the submitter's motives in posting a two-week old story to Slashdot, because if anyone bothers to read the rest of the blog, they'll note that the Dean campaign severed its ties to the Spamhaus when it was informed about the actions being taken in its name.

More balanced coverage from Spamvertized.org

It looks like an honest mistake, and its a shame that some people will fixate on this misstep.

A link near the bottom of the "technical details" page indicates that Dean was responsible. The page goes on to imply that it was foolish/irresponsible but unintentional.

After the Dean campaign was presented with clear cut evidence as to the nature of emailresponse.net, they investigated promptly and terminated their relationship with the company that same day.

-- jetlag --