MainSleaze

Today I received spam promoting the candidacy of US presidential candidate Herman Cain. I have no idea how I came to be on their email list. I don’t subscribe to political mailings and I’m very careful to try to avoid giving any personal information to companies or organizations that I think might sell my address to anyone else, getting me even more unwanted mail.

The source IP address is 74.116.233.15, coming from a server in the domain elabs10.com, which is registered to an email service provider called Lyris. Lyris may want to contact Jordan Gehrke of Americans for Herman Cain and ask him where exactly this email list came from. Political senders often buy/sell/trade email lists, claiming a nonsense exemption under CAN-SPAM. Thankfully, internet service providers and blocklisters are just as willing to block unwanted political spam as they are willing to block commercial spam.

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