Spam, Spam, Spam, Dole & Spam

seniorcoder writes "Check here for an article on CNN about the senate campaign of Elizabeth Dole being taken to court in North Carolina for the princely sum of $80 ($10 per piece of spam). My best regards to Ken Pugh, I hope his action is successful." $10 per email sounds fair, now I can start planning my mansion.

Comments

I'm gonna sue me up a mini-van

[rw2]

Here's my mail log.

Everything above 5 on the graph is better than 99% likely to be spam.

I'm rich!

(BTW, I use spamssassin, it's wonderful)

Re:I'm gonna sue me up a mini-van

[rw2]

I used gnuplot to graph and procmail to manage SA.

My procmailrc contains something like this:

LOGFILE=$HOME/procmail.logfile

SUBJECT=`formail -xSubject: \
| sed -e 's/[;\`\\]/ /g' \
| expand | sed -e 's/^[ ]*//g' -e 's/[ ]*$//g'`

FROM=`formail -xFrom: \
| sed -e 's/[;\`\\]/ /g' \
| expand | sed -e 's/^[ ]*//g' -e 's/[ ]*$//g'`

# Backup the last hundred messages. :0 c
backup :0 ci
| cd backup && rm -f dummy `ls -t msg.* | sed -e 1,100d` :0fw
| /home/wellner/bin/SpamAssassin/spamassassin -P -c /home/wellner/bin/SpamAssassin/rules

SPAM_STATUS=`grep X-Spam-Status |cut -d' ' -f3|cut -d'=' -f2 |sort -n`
MESSAGE_ID=`formail -xMessage-ID:: \
| sed -e 's/[;\`\\]/ /g' \
| expand | sed -e 's/^[ ]*//g' -e 's/[ ]*$//g'`

DATE=`date +"%m/%d/%y %H:%M"`
nada=`echo $DATE $SPAM_STATUS $MESSAGE_ID >> $HOME/email-scores` :0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
caughtspam

and my gnuplot file is:

set timefmt "%m/%d/%y %H:%M"
set format x "%m/%d"
set title "Distribution of spam values"
set xlabel "Date mail arrived"
set ylabel "Hit value"
set nolabel
set xdata time
set terminal png color
set yrange [-10:50]
plot '/home/wellner/email-scores' using 1:3 with points 20, 5 with lines 3, 7 with lines 7, 10 with lines 5

have fun.

Nice to make the point...but there's no case here

[mr_teem]

Am I missing something, or is this a no-brainer? The Dole campaign's electronic mail is non-commercial, therefore the law doesn't apply.

Here's one location of the text of the law...

Dole will win this one.

[bmasel]

Political speech gets a higher level of 1st Amendment protection than commercial speech.

Fer instance, municipalities may prohibit commercial signs on your front yard, but not "vote for" signs.

I'm a rich politician, so I can do what I want...

[Sylver Dragon]

In an August 26 letter to Pugh, the Dole campaign said that its e-mails are not commercial and thus do not fall under the anti-spam law.

As much as I would love to say Bullshit, spam is spam is spam, I know that I would be ultimatly proven wrong. This law was probably written and enacted by politicians, and I doubt that they would have been so allturistic as to stop political spam Though one possibly good outcome of this legal battle will be publicity. Let the world know that E. Dole is a supporter and user of spam. Maybe it'll even get some sort of backlash against the whole idea, but that is probably just wishful thinking again. And maybe, just maybe, this will raise a bit of awareness in our congress-critters, that we the people really hate spam. (By way of quick disclosure, I usually find myself voting Republican, but this type of thing is a good way for a cadidate to alienate me real quick.) In a way I now hope that Dole loses and this incident is cited as a part of the reason for it.