Nancy Pelosi: Urging a Spamtrap to Donate to the Democratic Party
U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, emailing via the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), is urging an email address that has not been live since before the previous presidential election to donate to the Democratic Party. The DCCC is sending a *lot* of spam to a number of spamtrap email addresses of mine, so much that I’m surprised they haven’t been listed by a major blacklist yet. The ESP is Blue State Digital.
Sending IP: 74.116.233.53
Spam Sample:
Actual Headers:
Received: from mta-inap6.bluestatedigital.com (mta-inap6.bluestatedigital.com [69.25.74.172])
by <xxx> (Postfix) with ESMTP id <xxx>
for <xxx>; Sat, 19 Nov 2011 12:xx:xx -0600 (CST)
Received: by mta-inap6.bluestatedigital.com (Postfix, from userid 509)
id <xxx>; Sat, 19 Nov 2011 13:xx:xx -0500 (EST)
DKIM-Signature: <xxx>
Received: from <xxx>
by bounce.bluestatedigital.com with local (PHPMailer);
Sat, 19 Nov 2011 13:xx:xx -0500
Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2011 13:xx:xx -0500
To: <xxx>
From: Nancy Pelosi <dccc@dccc.org>
Reply-to: dccc@dccc.org
Subject: enough is enough
Message-ID: <<xxx>@bounce.bluestatedigital.com>
X-Priority: 3
X-Mailer: PHPMailer [<xxx>]
X-maillist-id: <xxx>
X-maillist-guid: <xxx>
List-Unsubscribe: <http://www.dccc.org/page/unsubscribe/?email=<xxx>>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="<xxx>"
Readable Email:
From: Nancy Pelosi <dccc@dccc.org>
To: <spamtrap>
Subject: enough is enough
Reply-To: dccc@dccc.org
Enough is enough.
The clock is ticking toward the Super Committee’s November 23rd deadline. Republicans are insisting on eliminating the Medicare guarantee while cutting taxes for millionaires and refusing to include a robust jobs plan. That’s not fair.
<removed>
That’s why we’ve set a goal of raising $500,000 from grassroots Democrats before the critical Federal Election Commission deadline on November 30th to hold these Tea Party Republicans accountable. Will you stand with us?
Please contribute right now to ensure Democrats have a powerful showing in the first important deadline since the One Year Out to the election mark.
http://dccc.org/nov4
Thank you,
Nancy Pelosi
Contribute Today
http://dccc.org/nov4
This message was emailed to: <xxx>
To unsubscribe from this email list, please paste this URL into your browser:
http://dccc.org/optout
Paid for by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
430 South Capitol Street, S.E. Washington, D.C. 20003
(202) 863-1500 http://www.dccc.org
Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.
Contributions or gifts to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee are not tax deductible.
On 11/22/2011 (one day later), Nancy Pelosi spammed again via the DCCC. There’s no indication that Blue State Digital is aware that its customer is spamming.
We have been following this blog since its launch actually…..
We first brought this to DCCC’s attention on 10/19. We sent them the link to this blog and advised them to take steps to isolate & purge specific lists. This does not appear to have corrected the issue with their lists.
We are now in the process of taking our own action w/ DCCC. Is there any indication as to when your traps started getting hit?
ps: BSD follows MainSleaze, Word To The Wise, All Spammed Up, Email Karma, Mickey Chandler’s blog, the Magill Report, Al Iverson and Thoroguel!
Great Stuff…
That goes to show that I shouldn’t be impatient. 😉
With the DCCC, I’m seeing spamtrap hits on individual spamtraps across several different domains, about a half dozen total. Although my spamtrap collection is quite large for an individual, it’s relatively small compared to those of many blacklists and reputation services. If I am seeing a half dozen spamtraps on the DCCC’s list, they’re inevitably seeing more.
Each of these spamtraps is also getting a LOT of email from the DCCC — sometimes multiple emails a day recently. I can’t imagine that an opted-in subscriber to their lists (rather than a spamtrap) would want to hear from them that frequently. That’s likely to lead to ignored/unread email, unsubscriptions, and people at large web mail providers clicking the “This is Spam” button. You and I both know what that kind of thing does to deliverability.
I’d strongly recommend that they fix this before they’re dealing with problems worse than having some cranky antispammer grump about them on her blog. 🙂
BTW, Blueman, the dccc@dccc.org spam is continuing on a multiple-times-daily basis per spamtrap. Today Nancy Pelosi spammed through them again. They seem to think that they can ignore your warnings and you won’t take any action.
We are unsubbing / purging all “actionless” constituents from DCCC’s master list today…. This will eliminate around 300,000 email recipients that have never taken any action on a received message from DCCC..
Your blog is fantastic…
Keep it up!
ps: i’ll be checking back for any further developments 🙂
Cool. I’ll make sure to post about anything I see from the DCCC after today.
You might also want to be sure that you reconfirm email addresses for people who have been active with the DCCC, but for whom you have no evidence that they’re receiving or acting on the emails themselves. I’ve seen a bucketload of situations where a years-closed email address continued to be considered “live” because the individual that was associated with that email address years ago remains a customer of the company or participant in the organization. Users often don’t update information, especially email addresses. Many seem to view failure to update as a good way to get off of mailing lists that they don’t want to receive without severing a connection with the company or organization.
This is especially the case with political and activist non-profit emails. Those organizations don’t always understand that a user might want updates on what they’re doing, but not several times every day. (Like the DCCC has been mailing lately.) <wry grin>
please note:
DCCC just kicked off a full mailing (and we are purging the 300K in rcpt addys in about an hour)…
Your traps are probably going to see DCCC messages today..
I’ll post when the purging is complete…
Cool. I’ll ignore hits til you tell me you’re done. (In any event, since I look at actual emails, I can distinguish between a spam and a re-engagement/permission pass.)
Ok…
304,651 forced unsubscribes (forced by us at BSD)… the mailing blast (that DCCC initiated today mid-way between the forced unsubscribes) was prepped BEFORE the unsubscribes got underway..
regardless… that mailing is now over.. DCCC queues are clear.. the unactionable constituents have all been unsubbed…..
having said that….
if from this point on (“this point” = 11/30/2011 at 9:45pm EDT) you see new trap hits… please point this out again.. and we will investigate
lastly… many thanks about what you and the other guys are doing here…
this was all indescribably helpful..
J
So far, the silence… is LOUD. I haven’t seen a single spamtrap hit from the DCCC since December 1, and it’s December 4. Unless they’re foolish enough to spam their old list from another venue (which I know Blue State Digital can’t prevent), then you might well have saved them an SBL listing in the middle of election season. Nice work! 🙂
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