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

[asim.livejournal.com]

Let me put on my Web/Security Programmer hat, for a sec.
Many places, legit included, do this. Obama's site is built on a platform that does that kind of redirect all the time; for example, here's a link for "Reporting Objectionable Content" from a post on my blog, there:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/security/simple_report/DRFCRVlLSVkcHVJUQwRQCgxbUV9VGQZcDxZCAlFRGgcKCFtADQ0STUpDX0ZFSkQLC1BcXht0HAAS

It's not my preferred way of doing CMS, but it's far from illegitimate.

And yes, many sites DO encode the email in the link. And many of them do so, so that they can put the email into the box for the form to unsubscribe. It's not great, but yes -- there's just a paucity of people who can work on this, and that's true of most web stuff -- try actually talking to someone at Google or Yahoo about a problem over email. Hell, try finding a number!

So far as the email, it's nearly impossible to get email to millions of people at roughly the same time. SMTP (mail) servers are fast, but they will shut you down if you send too much at once, so it's been commented that the Obama Campaign sends out in batches. I have 2 emails, currently, that get emails from them; one copy of the email you reference came in at 12:28pm, the other at 3:18am.

Does that make sense?

[laid.livejournal.com]

It makes perfect sense from that standpoint, and I'd trust Obama's campaign to do the right thing with an url like that, but it looks a bit daunting to someone who's less trusting than I.

Did the email have the same unsubscribe target url? IOW, are they encoding other stuff in it?

[cellio]

That's not an unreasonable thing to do, so long as the folks doing it recognize that it makes their URLs cryptic and some folks will balk at that. I'd much rather see explict arguments (http://example.com/unsub.php?address=joeblow@maiilinator.com&source-msg=14a415 etc).