Erica won’t let me say anything bad about “good” politicians who spam. I would prefer to call them names. Today, though, I received political spam from someone calling themselves The Voter Email Company. The emails actually come from a company called intelisend.net. The email came from tvc-ip.com. I am guessing that they handle mass mailings in such a way as to avoid calling it spam. I googled them, but they seem to have a low profile. I guess you can only use a domain for a short time before the spam filters catch up on you.

What made this interesting is that it came in through a spam email address (an address that I set up and use to divert spam).

The email claims that it knows that I am a registered voter, something that it could not know about the owner of that email.

If you get such an email, do not opt out, that would only confirm that you read it. If you have a way to report spam (aol, gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc.) then do it. Otherwise black list it. If you can’t do anything else, just delete it.

Here’s the thing. Email is for sending messages to people that you know. It is a personal communication medium. It is not a broadcast medium. I do not sign up for impersonal email messages. I do not want advertising email. I don’t want someone who does not know me sending me messages that want to sell me something. This includes mass mailings from political candidates.

Any polititian who sends me spam has lost my vote. I may not want to vote for his opponent, but it is very easy not to pull any lever when given a bad choice.

Here is one reason why I hate spam.

In the month of May, I received 2547 total emails at my onebox.com account. Of that, the spam filters marked 2055. At least 200 spams got by and I had to delete them by hand. Luckily, it’s easy to spot spam without actually reading it. I also have onebox set to hide images and html.

I am not alone in receiving this kind of abuse. Multiply this by 100 million and you can get an idea what a drain spam is on internet resources.