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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?"
...even think for one second that this approach is acceptable?"
Probably for the same reasons spammers everywhere continue to do it: some people will click on the pretty colors - they get results.
Look at who is calling the Dean campaign savvy- its mostly political journalists. Do we really think they are qualified to label someone net savvy? Just because Dean supports use Meetup.com does not mean the campaign is net savvy. Heck, most politicians aren't even politically savvy...
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Why does a supposedly "net savvy" campaign even think for one second that this approach is acceptable?"
Well, here it is on slashdot - and probably will end up being posted on numerous other sites, blogs, etc.
And as the old saying goes "Any publicity, is good publicity"
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
Why hasn't he emailed those running the campaign and ask them if they are working with eScriptions.net and if they are, if they know about the spam?
First things first, ask the accused. If they admit to it, then you don't have to waste all the time on researching it. If any other answer, then the research could be done to verify the answer.
Question everything.
The answer is:
It's not about how you get seen; just get seen.
I am not trying to make a big statement or something, but just a personal statement .... which is ... as long as Mr. Dean agrees to stay of my KazaaLite sharing, I agree to stay out of his spamming ...
Mr. Bush will have $170 million to fight his campaign .... and as most of his Rangers and Pioneers get him $100,000 and $200,000, he doesn't need to spam them - he just invites them over for barbeque ...
Mr. Dean needs all those other folks who ain't got a couple hundred grand to give away to the Chief Thief ... as long as his campaign respects the opt-out of his emailing list, I think he should do what it takes ....
If after Sept 11 we have woken up in Mr. Bush's "New" world where liberties can be screwed at the drop of a hat, maybe we have also woken up in this political world of spamming ... phew; maybe I am going a little too far ...
ok ... I am just playing the spoiler ... but sometimes my intense hatred of all the members of the Lunatics Club of Donald Rumsfeld gets the better of me .. . and almost makes me wanna say - Dean, hit me with an another spam. Doh.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
His intentions are well founded, but he has a large staff of people who make decisions for him. One of them probably thought it was indicitive of his "net savy" reputation to use online mail as a form of campaigning.
Sounds resonable.
I don't think he's net savy, as much as he is resonable to needs to the internet generation, or more than likely using this as the thing to set him a part, and make him a great canidate for president if the stock in people caring about the internet grows.
Yee Haw.
http://use.perl.org
Exactly. Political solicitation is spam. And in our society the most aggressive spammer wins.
I think the itch here is how email systems get mucked up.
The Dean campaign is lean and mean so we should expect their auditing to be lackluster. Its not surprising that in the course of pulling favors they end up enlisting some information mercenaries.
But as a heads up they should probably keep things simple and clean. Participate in respected forums and maybe court some intelligent folks from around here to help them out.
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.
Why wasn't this tidbit of info in the original post? Sounds like the submitter may have had an axe to grind. Slashdot mods should be more vigilant and not allow this kind of thing to slip by, the things at stake are too important.
Getting round spam filters turns out to be the main technical skill the outsourcers provide.
I do not call this a skill. If I make a filter (not a spam filter, an EMAIL FILTER), then I do not want what I am filtering.
That means that you should not attempt to get around my filter to send me what you beileve I would like to recieve.
If I hang up on you, I do not want to buy your product, nor will I ever. Learn from this technique.
http://use.perl.org
It was necessary to destroy your privacy in order to save it?
I can't help but imagine what the reaction among the YRO crowd would be if this had been the Bush campaign.
Funny how when Orrin Hatch hires another company to run his website and that company violates copyright laws, it's Orrin Hatch's fault and he should be responsible.
But when the allegedly net-savvy Dean does the same, it's an honest mistake.
Mmmm.. Donuts
I think one of the most important jobs a citizen has is to review the candidates running for office and pick the best one. To that end, I do not think an email here or there about something important is a bad thing.
How does this crap get modded up? Any unsolicited, mass, annoying contact is spam. Why would you even think that it is ok to send someone email that they may or may not care about?
Then again, I guess those of us who are interested in politics could sign up with the individual campaigns to recieve emails.
Duh.
I don't want some politician to decide what is important for me to know. I know how to seek out information I am interested in, thank you.
Mmmm.. Donuts
And before anyone say just press the delete key how do you do that on that average 3000 spams I get a month?
By that number we're talking ~100 spams a day. You either need a new email address, or some better filtering. If you're hitting delete on 100 mails a day, you're wasting your own time.
Getting around spam filters is not just trying to get your e-mail client in an inbox that really matches one of the filters you have personally made.
Here's a real world example. I wrote an application so that staff in our college could go to a web page and send mail to the students of our college, either all students or by class year. Not wanting every person to see every other person's e-mail, I initially set this program up to bcc everyone and send a copy to the Deans as the to: recipients so they would know what the students got and I put a generic address as the from: so the students could hit reply and have it go to a central account but they could also see the deans' addresses to e-mail them.
Unfortunately, this got flagged by places like Hotmail and Yahoo as spam because I had just bcc'ed a large number of people.
So I had to send the messages out one at a time as individual messages, not as one message with a huge number of recipients.
I believe it is this kind of spam filter, cases where there is a legitimate reason to send mail to thousands of recipients without letting the recipients see each other's addresses, that the original poster was referring to.
This just completely ignores the whole point of the original posting:
If everyone's so net savvy, why are they spamming people?
This may be the very first candidate to be taken down via an anti-spam backlash.
The Dean campaign is decentralized, and one aspect of decentralization is that you'll have a lot of activity that's inherently outside the campaign's control. The fact that it's supportive of Dean doesn't mean that the Dean campaign sent it. For that matter, Dean's opponents might've funded it to make him seem less clueful about the 'net.
Jon Lebkowsky jonl@polycot.com http://www.polycot.com
There are many "well meaning" people who would like to see Dean elected, are not part of his official campaign group, but are really not net savvy enough to understand the issue of spamming. Some of them may even think that this helps Dean and are just ignorant of the issue. Don't think for a moment that Dean controlls the actions of all people who are "participating" in his campaign.
It's not spam. He's not trying to sell you anything. He's running for office. This is a great inexpensive way to compete against politicians who have more advertising funds. Far less annoying than TV ads, too.
That's a great idea. Now, instead of 5 candidates spamming me with "political speech", I'll get 500 because anyone now that anyone can get elected, they can all run and they'll all campaign with spam.
Spam as a campaign tool, being deregulated, is also not required to have the same truth content that the FCC would require in print, radio, or television media. This is what some would call a Bad Thing. George W. Bush sending 250,000,000 emails to everyone in America outlining his major strides forward in civil liberties, abolishing slavery and putting an end to Prohibition is not my idea of "political speech." Political speech can be free, like any other speech, but when it's nothing but lies and slander (look at the current state of spam), then it becomes too free.
The problem here is that the protocols simply don't work as well as they should. We don't have a way to know who is behaving honestly and who is not. That is a protocol bug. It is fixable but only if we face up to the fact that we need to fix it and get the email providers to deploy whatever changes are necessary.
;) Kidding.
;)
Well it might be a natural consequence and trade off for such a promiscuous system.
In my free hotmail inbox, I routinely get salacious emails whose subjects are obviously random walks with spaces in between the letters. If a random process can send me spam, then no amount of client side filtering will ever work completely.
The real problem is not email, or politics, or being rude, but the fact that the internet as a product of our collective choice; is not authentic. Its a big haze and its a turing test with every fricken email you get.
Everyone jumps at the thought of internet citizenship. That our privacy and individuality is at stake. The fact is, the most vociferous privacy advocates are really closet sex freaks who just want to pick up little kids in public forums.
But seriously, in meat space we have entrusted public agencies at various levels to enforce social canon to provide and protect our liberty but no further before liberty is diminished. Its a little recursive and confusing, but there is no way to apply that to the internet. Right now.
We elect to participate in an untrusted system with little enforcement.
If Dean were really smart, he would propose something as balanced as our bill of rights pertaining to a public network. It would blend well with environmentalism and the whole supernational mindset that is in character with politically neutral intellectual forums.
Like slashdot.
Did anyone ask Dean's campaign for comment before publicizing this information? It would be rather simple for opponents to send fake spam and have a few geeks spread the lie as gospel.
This is why I continue to trust our crappy corporate media more than independent media.
Because he had just introduced a bill to destroy the computers of users who did exactly what he did.
It perfectly illustrates how flawed his thinking for the bill was and how innocent people like himself in that case will get trapped in it.
That's why it's a big deal.
It is unfair to assume that the Dean camp is in fact the spammer simply because spam is being sent on their behalf. There are millions upon millions of Dean supporters, many with very deep pockets, any one of them could be running the spam campaign. It is like blaming Tuperware for some housewife inviting you to a Tuperware party. Now, that isn't to say that it is impossible for the spam to be coming from Dean For America but rather that it is both unlikely and unfair to come to such a conclusion without decisive evidence.
The New Root Council, kickin' ass sinc
It does not matter who the democrat run. As soon as Bush falls below 50% he'll start bombing sryia, iran or north korea and get re-elected by a landslide.
The democrats know this and so does the rest of the country. I say if you know you are going to lose anyway run somebody who is not afraid the tell the truth and who is not afraid to call republicans names. The republicans get to call all democrats traitors and traitors so the democrats need someone to call them facists and racists.
War is necrophilia.