{"id":1621,"date":"2003-08-17T10:52:31","date_gmt":"2003-08-18T00:52:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2003\/08\/17\/howard-deanspammer\/"},"modified":"2019-12-06T08:29:06","modified_gmt":"2019-12-06T16:29:06","slug":"howard-deanspammer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2003\/08\/17\/howard-deanspammer\/","title":{"rendered":"Howard Dean…spammer?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Will all due respect, someone in the Dean Team needs to get this issue<\/a> 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<\/a> Dean campaign e-mails to people who had not requested them.<\/p>\n

While it appears that the Dean campaign has discontinued their contract with the vendors (according to this \/. comment<\/a>), a single comment left in the midst of a \/. thread<\/a>, which I only found because it was linked to from Joy’s post<\/a>, 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<\/a>) each day.<\/p>\n

I’d suggest that the Dean campain make an official statement on their weblog<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

\n
[Update]{.underline}<\/dt>\n
\n[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.\n<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n

\n Howard Dean’s presidential campaign acknowledged on Monday that it had spammed an undisclosed number of people with unsolicited political advertisements.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hopefully this all settles down soon. In my view, it was definitely a mistake, but mistakes happen.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/p>\n

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

\n 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.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While it appears that the Dean campaign has discontinued their contract with the vendors, a single comment left in the midst of a \/. thread isn’t going to be seen by many people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2042],"tags":[14],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1621"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1621\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}