Is the Dean Campaign Spamming?

bluelark writes "A few days ago, a friend of mine fowarded to me some spam apparently from the Howard Dean campaign. The sender's return address, however, was dean@america.propulsive.net. In addition, this is not the Texas email we've all heard about. Being bored, I did some research, and I found some intriguing results. If you are interested, I've posted the the technical details and the the spam. Even though the images in the email are being served from Venezuela, the links in the body of the spam are actually redirects from a marketing partner called eScriptions.net to a Dean for America registration page. It appears that the campaign is outsourcing their email with some dubious marketing partners who are then using notorious spamhauses to send out the actual email. Why does a supposedly "net savvy" campaign even think for one second that this approach is acceptable?"

Comments

Re:Dept. of Nasty Tricks

[jetlag11235]

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 --

Re:Dept. of Honest Mistakes

[sparrow_hawk]

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.

This has already been resolved.

[fvdl]

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."

Official Dean For America Response

[Nicco, Dean for Amer]

Dean for America strongly opposes spam and has in place a "no spam" policy. We recently contracted with two vendors who made assurances that their lists were opt-in only. On Tuesday, August 12th, Dean for America received notification from a supporter that spam was being sent. We terminated our relationship with both vendors immediately.

There are currently no third party vendors authorized to send email on behalf of Dean for America and none planned in the future.

Please send any additional complaints to abuse@deanforamerica.com.