Prankster Pollutes Obama’s E-mail List

A Prankster—or pranksters—has apparently been signing up anti-spammers’ e-mail addresses and fake, off-color names to Barack Obama’s e-mail list.

As a result, people have been getting personalized messages from the front-running Democrat presidential candidate calling them rude names.

For example, anti-spammer Edward Falk recently received an unsolicited e-mail from Obama’s campaign calling him StupidSpamSucker SlutFace, according to a post on his Spam Diaries blog.

“Well, it's not every day that you get called a nasty name by a major presidential candidate,” wrote Falk.

And while the messages are probably the result of a childish prank, they also have the potential to seriously threaten Obama’s ability to communicate with supporters by e-mail.

Those on the receiving end of this prank are on the front lines of the war against spam and are involved to some degree or another with the Internet’s various anti-spam blacklists, including the much-feared Spamhaus.

Besides Falk, other anti-spammers received e-mail from Obama’s campaign addressing them by names such as SpamLovingWhore SlutFace, and SpamLover Stupid, according to an exchange on anti-spam discussion group Nanae.

The snafu is apparently because Obama’s e-mail registration process has no verification mechanism and allows any first and last name to be registered with any address.

Other candidates also have no verification e-mail warning people they’ve been signed up on a list, but their signup processes are somewhat more complicated and less vulnerable to the input of nonsensical names.

Obama’s home page at BarackObama.com asks would-be registrants only for first and last names, e-mail addresses and zip codes. As a result, anyone can put anything into the first-and-last-name fields and Obama’s campaign will send e-mail to the supplied address calling the recipient by that name.

Forge-subscribing people’s e-mail addresses to e-mail lists they would never sign up for themselves is a fairly common prank online. It is a tactic especially favored by some people who dislike anti-spammers as a way to infuriate them.

Forged subscriptions are also why anti-spammers demand that e-mail list builders “fully confirm” their new subscribers by sending a confirmation e-mail to them requiring a reply before they get added to the mailer’s list.

Fully confirmed e-mail address gathering, or “double opt in” as it is known in marketing circles, is not required by law, but is considered a best practice.

Some e-mailers have even had their messages blocked from recipients as a result of forged subscriptions.

For example, Deirdre Baird, chief executive of e-mail deliverability consultancy Pivotal Veracity, said a client she declined to name found messages being blocked from recipients at some of the major cable access providers because someone had forged subscribed to its list the address of one of the senior people at spam blacklisting concern Spamhaus.

Spamhaus maintains a list of sources of spam against which a significant number of e-mail administrators check to help filter incoming e-mail. An e-mailer who ends up on Spamhaus’s blacklist will have significant e-mail delivery troubles.

Though Obama’s IP addresses aren’t showing up on any of the major blacklists yet, his e-mail efforts are at risk of being blocked as long as his e-mail opt-in process is unconfirmed, especially now that anti-spammers have become aware of his loose e-mail policy.

“If the spam continues, they do risk having their mail filtered,” said Baird.

When a Nanae participant contacted Obama’s e-mail service provider, Blue State Digital, about the spam he and some of his colleagues were receiving, someone writing under the name Dan Simmon resonded: “We don’t confirm ownership of the subscribed e-mal address—no need, as there’s nothing to be gained from submitting fake signups.”

Nanae participants were, to put it midly, nonplussed by the response.

“Have you ever considered that perhaps opponents to your customer, Mr Obama, may want to smear his name by making his campaign look ignorant to spam issues? Of course, you have done *EXACTLY* that,” wrote someone posting on Nanae under the name Marc Bissonnette.

“Not only did I not sign up for your campaign, but I am CANADIAN, ferchrissakes!” he wrote.

Later in the exchange, Simmon said he had tracked down the offending IP address used to supply the fake names, blocked it from doing so again, and removed the addresses from Obama’s list.