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

Perhaps....

[pjdepasq]

Perhaps being net saavy means that you know enough to farm it out and not have to:
1) worry about doing it yourself, and
2) being able to blame it on someone else when it all goes badly (or is revealed as spam).

Re:Perhaps....

[Wellspring]

This is one of Niven's Laws: There is not cause so just and noble that you can't find total idiots following it.

OK, so let's get this out of the way. Political people have to eat crow on a regular basis when campaign tactics appear to be silly or stupid or craven or whatnot. This is just such a case.

Instead of coming up with innovative reasons why Dean is right or shouldn't be blamed, they should be contacting their man via his volunteer network and getting him to shape up. Every presidential candidate has had to apologize or reform when his campaign does something embarrassing. This is just such a case.

Dept. of Nasty Tricks

[sphealey]

It does occur to you that the Dean campaign might not be the ultimate source of that spam? That someone with a few thousand to burn and knowledge of the direct mail industry fired up a dirty tricks campaign to make it look as if the Deaners were responsible? Reference John McCain and the South Carolina "push polls".

Just a thought.

sPh

Dean Campaigners are Net Savvy

[Phoenix666]

I am part of the Dean campaign here in Brooklyn, and I am qualified to label the campaign net savvy. Over the past 6 years I've built massive e-commerce sites, B2B, non-profit, and many other sorts of web-projects. I used to work with asp/sql server, now mostly in L.A.M.P. And I'm not the only one. Three-quarters of the people in the campaign work in tech or internet-related professions, from coders to DBAs to sysadmins to designers to information architects. Furthermore, almost without exception all of those people use OSS. Yes, OSS, the same constituency as those who read /. In fact, through /. I have accidentally stumbled upon other Dean campaigners, and through the Dean campaign I have accidentally stumbled upon other /.-ers. If that doesn't define a net-savvy campaign, then I defy you to come up with a better definition.

But even without that, using Meetup and MoveOn, blogs and online contributions does make you net-savvy, because it is ground-breaking and it is working. They have used the internet as a tool to organize, raise money, and turn Dean from a little-known name into the front runner in the democratic field. That, my friend, makes you net savvy. Measure that against Bush, who won't even let you email him anymore.

All bulk email houses are 'suspicious'

[Zeinfeld]

If the person behind the story knew a bit more about the net he would know why every legitimate originator of a lot of emails is going to use an outsourcer and that without exception they are all listed as suspicious by anti-spam types.

The fact is that blacklists are not organized half as well as they would have people believe. If you want to send bulk mail you use an outsourcer because unless you do most of your messages will get classified as junk. Getting round spam filters turns out to be the main technical skill the outsourcers provide.

The problem with spam is that it has got to the point where everything becomes a he-said she-said argument. There is actually no way to know if either side is telling the truth. Try putting up a pro-israeli or pro-palestinian web site and you will find you are blacklisted for spamming before you send out a single email.

All 'outsourced maillers' are listed on blacklists, most of them for good reason. There is absolutely no way that an outsourced email provider can know if an email list provided by a client is legit or spam.

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.

That is not going to happen in time for the 2004 election. But think of this, until the Internet US politics has been game where you take as much money in bribes from corporate America and then you spend your whole time in office paying back favors. Bush and Cheney are paying back $2000 for every $1 they collected from the super-rich. Next election they plan to spend $200 million. That means another $400 billion to be spent on tax cuts for the super rich when the budget deficit is heading for $700 billion. Don't think you are getting any of that unless you are one of the insider investors. Otherwise you are more likely to find that your investment in Bush reaps the same results as your investment in 'Kenny Boy' Lay's Enron.

Re:All bulk email houses are 'suspicious'

[notque]

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.

And that is a legitimate use. I can understand that, and I hadn't considered spam filters that people put in place without knowing what is filtered. I.E. Yahoo and Hotmail's spam filtering.

But your point is also valid when considering what I would want or not. I would want something from a university that I was attending, and would not want anything from someone shilling their campaign through my email.

If I want to take the measures to learn about your campaign, then I will do so. I do not want it force fed to me (aside from the media.)

If it's okay for a campaign to mass email, then it is okay for a company trying to sell their products through mass email.

Which means, I get a lot of mass email. I already get more junkmail through the normal postal system than I do actual email. I honestly just don't want it. Do I not have a choice in this matter?

Re:All bulk email houses are 'suspicious'

[Trailer Trash]

All 'outsourced maillers' are listed on blacklists, most of them for good reason. There is absolutely no way that an outsourced email provider can know if an email list provided by a client is legit or spam.

Owning and running an ISP, I think I can respond rather well to this point.

Bullshit

My customers who send mass emails know that they are being watched. I have an idea of how many customers each has, and I correlate that to their list sizes. If one suddenly comes up with 1,000,000 names, guess what? I know it's not legit.

I had a telemarketing computer call one day with a message trying to rent mailing lists to the business. Near the end, the guy mentioned that I could rent their "35,000,000 piece opt-in email list". Bullshit. Nobody has the names of 35M people who want to receive trash in their email simply because there aren't 35M people like that on the entire planet.

My customers likewise know that I am prone to pick a random email address from their list and ask them for more information about that person. Real name, company name, and telephone number. And I occassionally call them to verify. I don't have to worry about spammers.

A little common sense goes a long way. You're obviously a Howard Dean fan, but let's face it, he's spamming. The argument that "he doesn't know any better", which is apparently what you're trying to make here, worked the first time.

This is no longer "the first time". Understand?

Michael

campaign spamming

[Gryftir]

Suprise, the Bush II relection machine also spammed. You can see it here on Cryptome.

The difference? Dean for America stopped working with the spamming company the same day. Did Bush-Cheney '04 Inc. ? No, However, after cryptome posted the e-mail, the email used in the spam was unsubscribed from the list, and an automatic confirmatory e-mail sent. This despite the fact that John, who runs Cryptome, never subscribed, and never sent in an e-mail requesting to be unsubscribed. There is no evidence that the unsolicited e-mailing has been stopped.

It's easy to say Dean for America isn't net-savvy. I mean they sent out some unsolicted e-mail right? But how many companies stop using spam once they realize what their marketing department was doing?

How many do it the same day? Bush, despite a record breaking campaign warchest still is soliciting by spam. Dean isn't. That tells me who is savvy.

Gryftir

Re:Who is calling the Dean Campaign 'Net Savvy'?

[sparrow_hawk]

Ehrm... (not connected w/ the Dean campaign or any other in any way, shape, or form -- I'm just an interested observer :)...

Have you looked at deanforamerica.com? I'd say that site is a good indicator of Internet-awareness. The man has a *blog*, for crying out loud! Actually, all the Democratic candidates are trying to capitalize on the Internet, which is IMHO a Good Thing, though it's taking some of them longer than others.

Contrast Dean's site with Bush's (ooh, shiney) for a good illustration of why the former is considered "net-savvy." (yes i know incumbents don't need to mobilize as early as challengers, yes i know Bush's site is a "temporary site," but Dean's campaign is still a masterful example of how to mobilize the internet community. i long for the day when the *president* writes a daily weblog.)

Oh, and if you think Dean is another Democrat who is against everything Slashdotters hold dear, check out some of his posts on Lawrence Lessig's blog. (Kucinich has some interesting things to say here as well. He's even pro-GPL!)

you know...

[HBI]

I'm a republican. I'm certainly not going to vote for Dean. Let's make that clear at the outset.

That being said, who cares about this in the long run? He apologized, I doubt they'll do it again, so I would hardly hold it against him long term. With all the spammers out there who will send out junk email - it's kind of hard to find someone reputable to do this for you. A campaign worker fucked up. Big deal.

That being said, isn't anyone on that side of the aisle worried about Dean? I find him to be the easiest Democrat to beat in the fall of 2004. This guy can be turned directly into the scion of leftist antiwar evil with a few carefully placed TV ads. The reason why he has survived till now is that he is running in a Democrat primary audience - a very leftist group to start with. His credentials and arguments play well there. Put him in a general electoral audience and watch how fast he gets bashed.

I'm going to risk a preliminary estimate of 500 electorals for Bush if Dean is the Democrat candidate. If you think i'm wrong, I recommend a drive to Middle America and a discussion with some of the people there.

At least Graham or Kerry or Lieberman would have a better chance with the general public. And for my sake, make this an actual campaign rather than a romp, willya? I haven't been overly happy with this administration.

Re:Dean does not control what volunenteers do...

[S.Lemmon]

Heh heh, it's also possible his opponents are even *more* net savvy, and are sending spam in his name to make him look bad. If you think about it, it's an easy way to attack someone - if the spam is "promoting" you, it's almost impossible to prove you had nothing to do with it. With most spam the mailers used are unconnected to what's being "spamvertized", so anyone can send spam claiming to promote you.

Re:Oh no!

[numark]

Reading further into the story, however, it becomes apparent that Dean's campaign was unaware of the tactics of their outsourced marketing company. As soon as they were alerted to the fact that spam was being sent out in their name, they immediately terminated their contract with the outsourcer.

The Dean campaign has been against spam heavily in the past. They do not support anyone who sends spam in their name. In this case, it was simply that the company that did their marketing misrepresented themselves as being an opt-in email list, but instead sent mass mailings to large numbers of people without Dean's consent. I can't really see how Dean can be blamed for something that was done without his knowledge or approval.