Some guy named Frank O’Leary is spamming me at two separate e-mail addresses about how proud he is to be my treasurer. (I don’t have a treasurer, but I could use one.) He tells me that I can pay my taxes at 70 bank branches, which I’m quite sure is a number that exceeds the number of bank branches in the area. He wants me to support him in the Democratic primary. I had to google him to discover that he’s up in northern Virginia somewhere. I don’t know what it is that makes people seeking these piddly offices think it’s a good idea to spam people hundreds of miles away. Oddly enough, it’s only candidates upstate who seem to subject me to this. I’ve added frankoleary.org to my junk mail filter.
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Me too.
Treasurer in Arlington is the race he is running in. For a while, I also received email from Tim Hugo telling me what a great job he was doing.
I am on the DPVA Chairs list, (hear that Kilo?) so I am guessing that is where part of this sort of thing comes from. Hugo is a Republican, however, so I am not sure why he thinks I would be interested in his race in a place I don’t even live.
Got an email from him too. I “unsubscribed” from his list…amazing since I’ve never met him or seen anything from him on the internet at all. I think we have some overzealous people in the blogosphere that think that because they support a candidate, no matter how small, we should be behind them because they are a Democrat. I have a problem with that. Just because you know my email address does not give you consent to send me crap…urgh!
He’s my Treasurer, and yet I get no email from him. He lives in the next neighborhood over from mine. Perhaps I’ll knock on his door and ask him why.
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I generally give out a unique email address whenever I contribute to or volunteer for a campaign (e.g., Webb06@blacknell.net), and have been doing that for years and years. The traffic in email address/supporter lists among politicians is amazing. And the mail merge botches are amusing. I once received an email asking for support from a Texas Rep that was sent to an address I’d given out when working in PA’s 13th district.
It’s a pseudo-small world in politics, MB.
One meeting means you are friends, too. That’s one of my favorites.
MB – good idea on the email addresses. I’ll have to use that one.
As for Frank – well, he’s a good guy, although not my treasurer, either. I do support his candidacy.
Hey Waldo, i added you and a small group of bloggers to the list becuase of all the recent blog stuff, especially on my blog… I didnt know you would be a problem. Sorry about that.
I don’t know that it’s fair to describe me as the problem here, James. :) Two folks e-mailed me today asking if it was OK that they’d added me to the mailing lists of campaigns that they’re managing. I’m totally uninterested in their candidates, but I’d like to keep up with these folks’ work, so I told both of them I was happy to be included. But without hearing from them I would have been annoyed. After all, who wants to receive e-mail from a complete stranger from a faraway place on a topic they don’t care about?
JAMES DIDNT GRADUATE MIDDLE SCHOOL:
I meant to say i didnt know IT would be a problem, not YOU.
Sorry :)
I get spam from O’Leary, too. It’s gotten to the point where I delete ALL political emails.
Geez, and I felt all guilty about emailing a potential volunteer from Greene!
I got it too. Not on the DPVA chairs list, but a lot of others. I guess he figures if he emails every Democrat in the state, he’ll cover every one in Arlington Co.
I got one of the emails, and sent an annoyed response to the campaign via their website contact form to suggest that in the future they attempt to filter their email lists. I believe I used a phrase like “this is prima facie evidence of an incompetent campaign”.
Wow. Maybe it would be faster to make a list of who didn’t get these e-mails? Who thought it would be a good idea to add my mother to the mailing list for this guy’s campaign?
Just last night I started filtering out the e-mail that announces every time that Bob McDonnell or Jim Webb pass gas. I like keeping up with my elected officials, but I’ve gotten one e-mail every day from Webb’s office in the past week, and five from McDonnell’s office in the same period. Also last night I unsubscribed from the DNC’s mailing list. It’s just too much, and it’s virtually never useful. Life’s too short to read all this.
Note to self: If ever running for office, do not send campaign emails to people outside of the voting contingency relevant to your particular race, unless somebody outside of that contingency specifically asks you to. Not acting in accordance with this rule can make you look annoying at best; completely asinine at worst.
Jeezzz! What is the big deal?? There is usually an “unsubscribe” at the bottom of political or any other type of campaign email. Everyone who blogs or comments on blogs should be sophisticated enough to know how to unsubscribe from an email list, no?
You know I really do not understand why people are STILL hyping those $&#*ing petitions for everything. “Sign my petition to support this and such” and “Become a citizen-cosponsor of my bill” – it’s not like ANYBODY cares who signed the damn petition, it’s just a means of harvesting email addresses. Why do bloggers keep hyping these things?
I don’t think anybody said it’s a big deal. The problem is death by a thousand cuts.
If I signed you up for a dozen mailing lists for things like FreeDealOffer and Bridal Monthly Fashion Tips, you’d be annoyed. If you knew I did it, you might e-mail me and say “Waldo, don’t do that — I don’t want to be on those mailing lists, and I just had to go and unsubscribe from all of them. Are there any others you’ve signed me up for?” And you’d be right to be annoyed.
We could test out my hypothesis, but I suspect you’d rather not. :)
“Jeezzz! What is the big deal?? There is usually an “unsubscribe” at the bottom of political or any other type of campaign email. Everyone who blogs or comments on blogs should be sophisticated enough to know how to unsubscribe from an email list, no?”
It’s not about me being able to unsubscribe from a newsletter or email. It’s about me unsubscribing from an email I never for which I never signed up. Someone knew my email and put me on the list. That to me is a trust issue.
“You know I really do not understand why people are STILL hyping those $&#*ing petitions for everything. “Sign my petition to support this and such” and “Become a citizen-cosponsor of my bill” – it’s not like ANYBODY cares who signed the damn petition, it’s just a means of harvesting email addresses. Why do bloggers keep hyping these things?”
Because it’s easier to do that then to actually do something substantive while still making that person feel good about themselves.
I’m receiving McCain 2008 e-mails…I’d like to know how I got on that mailing list, b/c I’m not voting for him.
Phil, if you’ve ever responded to a global warming initiative and included your email address, that might be how you got on the list. In particular, if you signed up with stopglobalwarming.org:
http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/sgw_marcher.asp?3
Clearly McCain is looking for some support from independents and “Reagan Democrats” if he gets the nomination, so it’s not surprising that he’s accumulating lists of potential supporters that go beyond the usual suspects.
I ran against Arlington County Treasurer Frank O’Leary in 1991. At the time, I learned through the grapevine that he was very upset that I ran against him because it meant he actually had to campaign and defend his policies before the voters. (I ended up with 23 percent of the vote, not bad for an underfunded Libertarian running a grassroots campaign.)
So far as I know, O’Leary has not had an opponent in a general or primary election since then — though I have been disengaged from Arlington County politics since moving to Charlottesville nearly 8 years ago.
Too many elected offices in Virginia have become sinecures for lack of competition — including the majority of seats in the General Assembly.
“Everyone who blogs or comments on blogs should be sophisticated enough to know how to unsubscribe from an email list, no?”
The big deal is that it’s pretty close to, if not illegal under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, if the customer did not sign up for the newsletter. It also mucks things up for people who legitimately sign people up for e-mail marketing messages, using an opt-in (or opt-out, hell, both are fine) system, instead of e-mail harvesting.
I paid attention in Internet Marketing the past two weeks, can anyone tell?
Unfortunately, CAN-SPAM has an explicit exception for political e-mail. Leave it to politicians to carve out exceptions for themselves, eh? :)
Wow, that’s beyond stupid. I’ll have to look into what the specific exceptions are- I’d like to assume that general things like misleading headlines, or not having a “unsubscribe” button would still be prohibited, but you never know.
No, they’re really not *both* fine.
They’re very much not both fine. :) Opt-out means that every single piece of spam that you get every day can keep coming, unless you explicitly tell every single spammer that you don’t want to receive anything from them anymore.
This is akin to, rather than carrying umbrella, kindly informing each raindrop that you’d like them to go away.
Hey, I got the “Team O’Leary” e-mail too, and I’m not even in Virginia (though much closer to Arlington than Waldo is). I wonder how the list was chosen. I suppose I do occasionally write about NoVa politics.
Yep, me, too. And these are truly annoying. Like the Ditzy Dems, I’m just going to have to route them to my spam filter. I never signed up for these.
Oh, and the Webb emails? No unsubscribe info.
“They’re very much not both fine.”
My bad, y’all, I was thinking of another type of internet campaign thing, where you’re already signing up for something, and they want you to sign up for other things while you’re signing up for the thing you want to sign up for, and the other things are already checked, so you have to un-check all of them.
And by fine, I meant, “Fine in that at least you’ve given me the option of unchecking them instead of signing me up for them without telling me.”
Man, I’ve got a lot of studying to do.