MainSleaze

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.

Targeted Victory is a name that I and others in the antispam world have heard before, and not in a positive way. In 2012 Spamhaus listed Targeted Victory as a partner-in-spam of ROKSO listee Activate Direct. As I mentioned in a blog at the time, Activate Direct operated a snowshoe spam operation for Targeted Victory to promote Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. It generated enough spam and was disconnected from enough ISPs to earn a ROKSO by election day.

I hope that Targeted Victory has learned its lesson and in 2014 will not flood the Internet with snowshoe spam promoting its favored candidates and causes.

Sending IP: 208.73.5.112

Spam Sample:

Actual Headers:

Received: from mail4643.targetedvictory.mkt5241.com (mail4643.targetedvictory.mkt5241.com [208.73.5.112])
	      by <xxx> (Postfix) with ESMTP id <xxx>
	      for <xxx>; Thu, 28 Aug 2014 15:##:## +0000 (UTC)
DKIM-Signature: <xxx>
DomainKey-Signature: <xxx>
Received: by mail4643.targetedvictory.mkt5241.com id <xxx> 
        for <xxx>; Thu, 28 Aug 2014 15:##:## +0000 
        (envelope-from <v-v@bounce.targetedvictory.mkt5241.com>)
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2014 15:##:## +0000 (GMT)
From: Matt Hirsch <info@gregabbott.com>
Reply-To: info@gregabbott.com
To: <xxx>
Message-ID: <xxx>
Subject: 5,000 Attack Ads
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; 
	boundary="----=_Part_<xxx>"
x-mid: <xxx>
x-job: <xxx>
x-rpcampaign: <xxx>
x-orgId: <xxx>
List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:v-<xxx>@bounce.targetedvictory.mkt5241.com?subject=Unsubscribe>

Readable Email:

From: Matt Hirsch <info@gregabbott.com>
To: <spamtrap>
Subject: 5,000 Attack Ads

Friend,

It’s being reported that Sen. Wendy Davis has spent $4 million on negative TV ads in the month of August.

That amounts to more than 5,000 ads attacking Greg Abbott that have been seen by millions of Texas voters.

In order to effectively fight back, we need to raise an additional $46,000 by the end of the month – your contribution will help get us there.

<removed>

POLITICAL AD PAID FOR
BY TEXANS FOR GREG ABBOTT
PO BOX 308, AUSTIN, TEXAS 78767

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