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

Why does a supposedly "net savvy" campaign...

[Spoticus]

...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.

Who is calling the Dean Campaign 'Net Savvy'?

[Neologic]

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...

Re:Dept. of Nasty Tricks

[Dragonfly]

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.

Re:All bulk email houses are 'suspicious'

[notque]

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.

Re:Dept. of Honest Mistakes

[donutello]

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.

YES

[donutello]

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.

Re:All bulk email houses are 'suspicious'

[jd142]

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.

But who is the spammer?

[jonkl]

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.