I'm in the process of reviving and reorganizing this site for the 2006 election cycle. In the meantime, I have two posts up on spam on behalf of William Weld (NYS Governor's race) Here and Here. Also, Chip Rosenthal is cataloging political spam in the Austin, Texas area here.
As I write this, I'm not quite sure what is ultimately going to end up on this page. I've seen spam from the Republican National Committee plugging Bush, I've seen spam from Howard Dean supporters in Texas promoting a meet and greet event, and I've heard of but not seen some other spam from Democrats, possibly including the DNC.
The gist of my concern is that political spam should be no more acceptable than any other kind of spam, and it looks like 2004 is an election where political spam may, unfortunately, realize its full potential to annoy and aggravate, no different than V1AGARA spam or spam promoting products alleged to enlarge certain body parts.
At first, we're just going to collect political spam as it happens, post it here, and document responses or non-responses of various and sundry campaigns to being labeled spammers.
This site has gotten a modicum of attention on places like slashdot and somethingawful, and some of the comments I've seen have reminded me of the slashdot tendency to try and be first.
This site does not try to be first to post things. I got the first sample from the recent Dean joe-job run on Friday (8/15/2003), and held it until Sunday (8/17/2003) evening trying to get a good understanding of what was going on. I will continue to operate in this manner. By sunday evening, I had a much firmer grasp of the situation with the Dean joe-job, and as such posted a much more accurate and detailed story. I am adding a "coming attractions" section where I will mention impending items, but of necessity will keep detail to a minimum.
You ask "But aren't other things spamvertized besides politicians?". That's a fair question. The placement of this political spam site on www.spamvertized.org is opportunistic; I wanted to do a political spam page and Dave Lugo had this domain name available. Now at some later date, it may well end up a general site devoted to anything Spamvertized -- but that'd be a lot of work, and right now I want to focus on abuse of the Internet in the name of politics.
If you receive a political spam, particularly for a national campaign where the winner gets to go live in Washington DC, I'd be happy to get a copy. Here are the rules:
Send submissions to the Webmaster.
It appears that political spam campaigns often rely quite heavily on the practice of epending. Epending is sold heavily by quasi-legitimate email marketing firms as a way to get email addresses for the customers of a business, and it appears political parties are approaching it from the same point of view -- "we want email addresses for our members, so we can spam them".
What an epender does, basically, is take information about the targeted parties (name, address, etc.) and mine through network resources trying to come up with their email addresses.
The first and most obvious problem with epending is that it may well be the case that they didn't want the business or political party to have their email address in the first place.
The second problem with epending is that the practice is unreliable in the extreme; how can you be sure that the JoeSmith@isp.example.com you found is the same Joe Smith who is a member of the FrooBaz party? Often you can't, and the result is that you spam the wrong person. It's at its worst when there's no way for the "wrong Joe Smith" to really get off the list once he's on it, or when the list with the "wrong Joe Smith" gets sold or traded.
If actual errors are shown to us, we will revise the entry accordingly. This will require some genuine proof. If anyone representing an organization which has allegedly committed political spam wishes to provide an official statement rebutting or disputing what I say here, I will post it on this website without editing or changing it, although I reserve the right to post my own response here as well. Corrections and rebuttals to The Webmaster. please.
Send comments and sample spam to webmaster@spamvertized.org. If it happens that you can't get through because of restrictions on incoming email, use rwelty@suespammers.org, which doesn't have any blocking lists in place. Sorry about any incovenience, but I get way too much spam.
A number of folks have assisted with this page. In particular, I'd like to mention Dave Lugo, who researched several pages on this site and who provides the domain name "spamvertized.org" which this site uses.