Jon Bruning: Campaigning to a Spamtrap?
Jon Bruning, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in the state of Nebraska, is sending bulk email notices to an email address that was closed in 2004. The email address appears to have belonged to a small company that went bankrupt many years ago, and to have been used to manage that company’s ISP service. It does not appear to have been a personal email address for anybody. The ESP is IContact.
Sending IP: 216.27.86.184
Spam Sample:
Actual Headers:
Received: from drone127.ral.icpbounce.com (drone127.ral.icpbounce.com [216.27.86.184])
by <xxx> (Postfix) with ESMTP id <xxx>
for <xxx>; Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:xx:xx -0600 (CST)
DKIM-Signature: <xxx>
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2012 15:xx:xx -0500
To: <xxx>
From: "Jon Bruning" <Campaign@jonbruning.com>
Subject: America's Toughest Sheriff
X-Priority: 3
X-Mailer: PHPMailer (phpmailer.codeworxtech.com) [version 2.2]
Errors-To: bounces+<xxx>@icpbounce.com
List-Unsubscribe: <https://app.icontact.com/icp/listunsubscribe.php?<xxx>>
X-List-Unsubscribe: <https://app.icontact.com/icp/listunsubscribe.php?<xxx>>
X-Unsubscribe-Web: <https://app.icontact.com/icp/listunsubscribe.php?<xxx>7>
X-ICPINFO:
X-Return-Path-Hint: bounces+<xxx>@icpbounce.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="<xxx>"
Message-ID: <<xxx>@drone127.ral.icpbounce.com>
Readable Email:
From: Jon Bruning <Campaign@jonbruning.com>
To: <spamtrap>
Subject: America’s Toughest Sheriff
Dear <xxx>,
I’m proud to announce that I’ve received the endorsement of “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” Joe Arpaio. Sheriff Joe is known across the nation as a powerful critic of the federal government’s lax enforcement of immigration laws and I stand with him in the fight to bring real reform to the federal government’s failed immigration policy.
<removed>
Together, we’ll ensure that Nebraska is represented by a strong conservative voice in the U.S. Senate. Thank you for your support.
Warmest Wishes,
Jon Bruning
P.S. Let’s send a message to Washington that we’re tired of the failed policies of this administration. [4]Please contribute $25 today.
[5][jpeg] [6] [jpeg] [7] [jpeg]
Paid For By Bruning For Senate, Inc. | P.O. Box 83950 | Lincoln, NE 68501
Hi Catherine,
I’ve disabled this sender’s account pending the results of our investigation of their acquisition practices. Thanks very much for the heads-up.
Best,
Andrew
iContact
No problem, Andrew. I’m seeing a large number of political spams hitting my spamtraps lately, most of them due to the current American election year. :/ I expect that I will be posting quite a bit of election-year spam. I just hope that other ESPs will be on top of it too. 🙂
Did somebody re-enable his account, Andrew? He hit another spamtrap this evening, looks like the same IContact account.
Hi Catherine,
It does appear that the account was re-enabled, and the customer is being required to re-confirm their lists. Did the new mail you received more closely resemble the original spam?
Thanks,
Andrew.
Here’s what I’ve seen since I posted above from Jon Bruning’s campaign:
Date: Tue, 21 Feb 2012
From: “Jon Bruning”
Subject: In Case You Missed It
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2012
From: “Trent Fellers”
Subject: The Poll Numbers Are In
Neither of these emails resembled the first one, nor was either one a permission pass.
:/ I forgot to change the angle brackets to proper HTML entities, so the email address doesn’t show above. In both cases, it was “campaign@jonbruning.com”. (That’s why I knew the second email was from the same list.)
Our guy for sure. The account was re-enabled in such a way that the only kind of message he could send was reconfirmation requests.
I suspect the second trap hit got out before I could disable the account. I was at MAAWG this week – just back in this morning – and I did not see the post until at least a couple of hours later, and probably quite a bit later.
Andrew.
The first one might have been, but what about the message that went out on the 23rd? It wasn’t a reconfirmation.
The emails from Jon Bruning continue, from IContact. None of them has remotely resembled a reconfirmation. Something is wrong.
On a possibly related subject, IContact was just bought out by a marketing firm located in the suburban Washington D.C. area, so things are probably pretty confused at the moment. I hope that IContact recovers its footing and does not allow politicians or anybody else to spam from them.