Howard Dean…spammer?

Will all due respect, someone in the Dean Team needs to get this issue sorted out quickly. There’s a growing hubbub over the apparent fact that the Dean campaign at one point contracted with two e-mail vendors who then started spamming Dean campaign e-mails to people who had not requested them.

While it appears that the Dean campaign has discontinued their contract with the vendors (according to this /. comment), a single comment left in the midst of a /. thread, which I only found because it was linked to from Joy’s post, isn’t going to be seen by many people, and I’ve seen this issue get mentioned on more and more blogs (like this one) each day.

I’d suggest that the Dean campain make an official statement on their weblog. While it may make for momentary run of slightly bad press, it won’t be nearly as bad as if the meme of ‘Howard Dean as spammer’ continues to spread.

[Update]{.underline}

[This C|Net story] on the controversy, dated 8/18/03, leads off with the statement from the Dean campaign admitting their mistake and reiterating that they have cancelled their account with the e-mail vendors in question.

Howard Dean’s presidential campaign acknowledged on Monday that it had spammed an undisclosed number of people with unsolicited political advertisements.

The campaign said Dean, the former Democratic governor of Vermont, remained opposed to unsolicited bulk e-mail and blamed the spamming on two contractors who had promised to contact only people who had specifically requested to receive the advertisements.

“We recently contracted with two vendors who made assurances that their lists were opt-in only,” the campaign said in an e-mail to CNET News.com. “On Tuesday, August 12th, Dean for America received notification from a supporter that spam was being sent. We terminated our relationship with both vendors immediately.”

Hopefully this all settles down soon. In my view, it was definitely a mistake, but mistakes happen.

Update:

Wired also has a story about this, mentioning that there were two waves of spam messages sent out, and the second didn’t seem to actually originate from the Dean campaign.

As for the Dean for America campaign, staffers there are less concerned with where the second message came from than with how to handle the aftermath of the first one.