Dean Missteps

Yes­ter­day, I men­tioned Howard Dean’s cam­paign as a lead­ing force in the use of the Inter­net for cam­paign­ing. Today, I dis­cov­ered the dark side of that cam­paign­ing effort and its name is SPAM. Check­ing my inbox, I noticed an incon­gru­ous mes­sage enti­tled Impor­tant mes­sage from Gov. Howard Dean. The mes­sage was largely incon­gru­ous because I have not signed up with any of Dean’s online or offline effort. How­ever, since I had writ­ten a story about their cam­paign on the blog, I ini­tially though that maybe they were mon­i­tor­ing blogs (through Tech­no­rati or a sim­i­lar mech­a­nism) and might send auto­mated mes­sages of thanks, which would explain the kind of recep­tion the Dean cam­paign is get­ting in the blogosphere.

But that was not it. Instead it was spam. How do I know it was spam? Well, sev­eral reasons.

First of all, the email was sent to an address I used a long time ago to reg­is­ter a prod­uct. That email data­base was appar­ently resold and I have never received any legit­i­mate email on it.

The next thing that alerted me to spam was the fol­low­ing mes­sage at the begin­ning of their email:

EmailResults.net is send­ing you this spe­cial mes­sage from Gov. Howard Dean as part of the terms of service/membership agreed to when you signed up with http://www.sportskill.com. Please fol­low the instruc­tions at the end of this mes­sage if you pre­fer to not receive these spe­cial offers in the future.

Sportskill.com? This is a site that I prob­a­bly would never visit (as it only offers fan­tasy sports leagues, a sub­ject in which I have no inter­est). So, some­how, this site acquired a spam email address and is now dis­trib­ut­ing mes­sages in sup­port of Gov­er­nor Dean.

I’d be inter­ested in know­ing whether the mes­sage was sent by Sportskill.com on its own or was agreed upon by the Dean cam­paign. If the lat­ter is true (as the line Paid for by Dean for Amer­ica at the end of the mes­sage seems to sug­gest), I would like to make sure that the Dean cam­paign is aware that spam­ming is NOT OK in the online world.