[Scspamcop] Re: hillary clinton campaign spam

[Tim McGraw]

geekyguy wrote:
> I'm receiving these campaign support requests at an email address that was somehow harvested or obtained against my will.

The U.S. CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 exempts political speech and, therefore, 
bulk email sent by politicians. I do not know if entering someone else's 
email address into a "Get email from Hillary" box at the top of all her 
Web pages will generate an opt-in email to the entered address or not. 
If not someone who has nothing to do with the campaign might have 
"force-subscribed" your address. Technically, no law was broken. 
Technically it's still spam and reportable through spamcop.

It is almost always true that one does not want to unsubscribe from a 
list they never subscribed to in the first place. However if I were 
receiving this - which is legitimately from the HC campaign - I would 
try to unsub first and report them only if the unwanted emails continue.

Miss Betsy wrote:
> The email, itself, appears to be coming from ibm.com which I assume is IBM. My guess is that it is either an overzealous supporter or an ignorant user who has an infected computer.

IBM does more than just sell business computers, it also sells Internet 
services to top-level ISPs and other Internet businesses. In this case I 
believe the source, 129.41.77.122, to be leased by IBM to Postini, which 
is consistent with the MX record for hillaryclinton.com. The headers in 
your item also show what appear to be legitimate DomainKey lines, though 
I am no expert on DomainKeys.

geekyguy wrote:
> I've received numerous emails...several per week...and they're all coming from IBM and rackspace, where I presume the server is located.

The tracker you provided showed IBM as the source of the email item and 
rackspace as the host of the pages.

geekyguy wrote:
> My suspicion is that the campaign has targeted domains with name "newyork" in them, as was the case with the email address in question..

If that is the case it might be, as Miss Betsy says, "an overzealous 
supporter" and likely not commissioned by HC's campaign.