bad form

[cellio]

About a week ago I started receiving spam ("that you signed up for" -- um, no) from the Obama campaign. Complaints to their postmaster have gone unheeded (and have not bounced). My first letter took the tone of "this must be a mistake" and I commended them on the otherwise good experiences I've had with their campaign while asking them to correct this error; the second was closer to "you are reflecting poorly on your candidate". Still nada. As a matter of security I do not follow "unsubscribe" links in unsolicited email (who knows what they'll really do?), though I did go to their site (through the front door) and leave feedback reporting this problem.

The problem is not only continuing but escalating. I can set my spam filters to take care of this, but it's bad manners on their part and seems unwise when they want my vote.

If anyone reading this has ties to this campaign, you might want to tell them to knock it off. I would point out that the opposition has not stooped to spamming me so far. (If I'm really lucky, perhaps this post will snare a campaign person following referrer links.)

Comments

[scaharp.livejournal.com]

Oh, that does suck.

I "joined" the campaign recently, so I get the emails also. They're clearly an automated thing that gets sent to everyone on their list (it is curious how they got your address, though). I get one almost every day. Their postmaster is probably inundated with thousands of emails from folks like you who do not want to use the unsubscribe feature, so I would imagine it could take a few days to take care of it.

They've been so polite and reasonable in all other dealings I've had, and they stress that as well in their how-to-be-a-campaigner literature, so I have to imagine they *intend* to follow your directive reasonably soon, but haven't been able to yet.

Maybe since Asim says the unsubscribe link worked and didn't jeopardize his address, you could try that even though it's not your normal protocol.

I'm sorry about this, and if I speak in person to anyone in the campaign I'll mention it to them.

[cellio]

Thanks.

I wrote a procmail rule to auto-file their mail as spam. (I check my spam traps every day or two, so if an actual human being responds to my email complaint, I'll still see it.)

While it's not as big a factor as the security angle, another argument against the "go to our web site to get off our mailing list" approach is that it should be as easy to get off as to get on. This is true for everything, not just spammers. If I can subscribe to your hypothetical mailing list by sending email, I'd better be able to unsubsribe the same way. It's not legitimate to introduce any further hurdles, IMO. By participating in some sort of "a causal glance gets you on but it takes effort to get off" scheme, I help legitimize that, and that can't be good.

I do realize that standing on principle is a minority position. I can get an acceptable outcome by filtering; could I get a better one (less mail) by compromising the principle and using their link? Probably, but the acceptable outcome is good enough for me and the principle matters. (Again, security is still a bigger issue.)