IP: more on Campaign spam is OK?

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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From: 

!!! < DAVE, PLEASE SEND ***ANONYMOUSLY*** IF SENT TO IP!!!! > !!!




>     Bill Jones, Republican gubernatorial candidate's campaign
>     apparently sent a million political e-mail messages as
>     part of his campaign the other day, resulting in his web site
>     being shut down.
>
>     And the campaign spokesman doesn't see anything wrong with
>     using mass email...saying that it's " ...an innovative way of
>     direct voter contact."

   Dozens of what were apparently that same e-mail showed up here.  The
message
said it was sent based on "voter demographics" - bull.  It showed up in a
wide variety of internal utility addresses that have nothing to do with
people at all.

   My initial reaction was to assume that the mailing was a covert attack by
anti-Jones factions, in an attempt to paint Jones as a spammer and cause him
to LOSE votes.  The message included a number of elements commonly
associated with spam:

 . Apparently forged headers, including the resulting "top"
   Received: line, which indicated it was from "msn.com", but
   for which reverse DNS lookup yielded an IP address
   registered in TURKEY.

 . Internal URL references pointing at purely numeric IP addresses,
   and containing other suspicious elements.

 . The entire message sent as one long block of HTML-only text.

In other words, totally clueless, totally obnoxious, or both.
All this apparently from the current California Secretary of State,
the man in charge of all VOTING in California, among many other
critical functions.  Need I say more?



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