Targeted Victory, a U.S. political campaign organization, is emailing several of my spamtraps. Most are typotraps: pristine spamtraps that are similar enough to the domain names of large ISPs or companies that they receive a great deal of misdirected email. The email was sent through ESP and marketing automation specialist Silverpop, which was recently acquired by IBM.
Secure America Now, a political web site whose splash page promotes the impeachment of U.S. President Barack Obama, just emailed a spamtrap email address at a former European ISP. The email address has not been live for several years, and formerly belonged to a citizen of that country who had no ties to the United States. The email was sent through NationBuilder, a “community organizer” that uses ESP Sendgrid.
Ning, a social networking service intended primarily for entertainers who want to manage fan networks but now used by political and activist organizations as well, just sent a bulk email to an email address that has never existed. The Ning user that sent the email, and probable source of the spamtrap, is the Patriot Action Network, a prominent Tea Party organization that has appeared in my spamtrap collection a number of times before.
It became obvious in the past week that the real story of political spam in this campaign doesn’t involve ESPs and legitimate bulk email. It involves snowshoe spam being sent either by U.S. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign, or a supporter. Whoever is sending this spam is sending much larger quantities of spam to purchased and other non-opt-in lists than all of the legitimate campaign mailing lists and ESPs combined.
Today’s spam take: seven spam emails from one presidential campaign, one senatorial campaign, and our old friends the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). The DSCC, DCCC, and MittRomney.com are really pumping it out today. :/ Mailings from the DSCC, DCCC, and ElizabethWarren.com are blocked by SpamCop, a major blocklist. So far MittRomney.com has escaped listing on any widely-used blacklists, but if the spamtrap hits continue at this rate, that won’t last.
I admit it. I’ve been hesitant to talk about the flood of political spam that is hitting my spamtraps because there’s so much of it that I don’t know where to start. But the situation is crazy and getting worse by the day. So welcome to the new Political Spam Today report on the MainSleaze blog.