Spammed by Obama (again)
Wow, just got this in my inbox from a 'Nashy P' someone-or-other. Email headers indicate it's from Blue State Digital, the same place where my earlier ObamaSpam came from (to be fair, this was sent to a different address), but the from address was what appears to be Nashy G's yahoo account.

Hey --

In the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, John McCain wants to change the subject from the central question of this election.

Perhaps that's because the policies McCain supported these past eight years are pretty hard to defend.

The Obama campaign put together a documentary about why John McCain's failed philosophy and poor judgment are a recipe for deepening the crisis.

Watch the documentary now and share it with others:

http://my.barackobama.com/keatingvideo

Thanks


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A user has sent this message from BarackObama.com. The sender's name, email address, subject and message have not been verified.

Duh. Of course it's unverified. That's the problem. Politics aside, this is incredibly poor email practice. While the company I work for often does set up 'forward to a friend'-type capabilities, we recommend against it for anything political or which otherwise might offend or polarize people - exactly because of this potential for misuse.

Judging by the address this was sent to (an account I've only ever used for reporting spam), my "buddy" NashyG is attempting to get Obama's email service provider reported for spamming, potentially resulting in their email being blocked, or causing problems with their ISP.

In essence, they allow any random interweb idiot to a) cause potential problems for their sending IP and/or domain; b) cause problems for whatever address they enter which the email will be sent 'from'.

As an alternative, why not create a form which dynamically creates a template with a tracking URL (the one in the original message had a tracking string which I've removed), and have people copy and paste it into their own email clients? The biggest problem there would be that the ESP doesn't get paid - and, well, people who don't know how to copy and paste (but even my grandparents know how to do this!)

So it's a business decision then. Potential problems on whatever IP they're using to send these, vs. a few dollars per thousand of these sent. In the time since others have checked the candidates' IP sending reputation, it does appear the score for the IP which originated this particular message has declined significantly. Has it been worth it, Blue State Digital?
- posted by vcmc @  10/06/2008 06:35:00 PM