MainSleaze

An organization that I did not see or hear from during the recent U.S. Presidential election campaign, The Tea Party, began sending email a couple of days after the election to a brand new shiny spamtrap at a domain that I have owned for some time. This spamtrap has not previously received email from anybody: I enabled it last week after I reviewed my mail logs and noticed that somebody was trying to send email to it. The IP that sent this email belongs to ESP Sendgrid. The domain that sent this email, pd25.com, belongs to what I thought was a rival ESP, ExactTarget. The authorized use policies (AUP) of both ESPs decidedly require that bulk email sent through them be sent only to email addresses that opted in.

So how’d this happen? My guess is a typo. Either somebody typoed their email address when signing onto the list at the web site, or (alternatively) somebody typoed when entering an email address from a card collected at a meeting, or a handwritten list. Since TheTeaParty.net does not confirm subscriptions, they are now spamming one of my spamtraps, and how many others? TheTeaParty.net needs to protect itself better against mistakes and (unfortunately) possible dirty tricks that could damage its reputation and distract it from its mission.

Sending IP: 208.117.55.160

Spam Sample:

Actual Headers:

Received: from o284.email.pd25.com (o284.email.pd25.com [208.117.55.160])
        by <xxx> (Postfix) with SMTP id <xxx>
        for <xxx>; Wed, 14 Nov 2012 02:xx:xx +0000 (UTC)
DKIM-Signature: <xxx>
DomainKey-Signature: <xxx>
Received: by 10.36.xx.xx with SMTP id <xxx>
        Tue, 13 Nov 2012 20:xx:xx -0600 (CST)
Received: from [127.0.0.1] (unknown [10.8.xx.xx])
        by None (SG) with ESMTP id <xxx>
        for <xxx>; Tue, 13 Nov 2012 20:xx:xx -0600 (CST)
Message-ID: <<xxx>@swift.generated>
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2012 21:xx:xx -0500
Subject: Will you take this poll?
From: The Tea Party <info@theteaparty.net>
To: <xxx>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
 boundary="<xxx>"
X-Sendgrid-EID: <xxx>
X-Sendgrid-ID: <xxx>

Readable Email:

From: The Tea Party <info@theteaparty.net>
To: <spamtrap>
Subject: Will you take this poll?
Reply-To: enews@verizonbusinessmadeeasy.com

New from TheTeaParty.net:

Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser
http://ttpmail.theteaparty.net/webmail/<xxx>

Dear Patriot,

We must work together to continue to send a message to our elected
officials in Washington, D.C. I would call them leaders, but the fact
that they seem to want to dictate to us instead precludes me from using
that word. Now is the time for those freedom loving Americans who stand
for liberty, will fight for the Constitution, believe in personal
responsibility, and want a constitutionally limited government to stand
together and let everyone know that we are still here and we will make
our voices be heard louder than ever!

http://ttpmail.theteaparty.net/<xxx>

<removed>

Our mailing address is:

The Tea Party
1701 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Suite 300, PMB-433
Washington, DC, 20006
United States