Is Tony Blair the world’s newest political spammer? It’s looking that way, as spam claiming to be from Tony Blair has hit thousands in England. Tony Blair’s labour party actually admits sending the email, although they claim that it is not spam , and that they did no wrong. Did Tony Blair actually hit “send”? Almost certainly not. However did Tony Blair know of the email? Request it? Approve the copy? Even if not, the email is “from” Tony Blair, having the name “Tony Blair” in the sender field, and, as they say in politics, the buck stops there. Or at least it should.
The email starts out with “Dear Labour Supporter”, but many of the people who received the spam are not only not supporters of England’s Labour party, but are actively members of other parties. Such as Liberal Democrat MP Richard Allan. Allan, and many others, did not ever sign up to receive the email from Tony Blair, or any other member of the British Labour party.
Said Allan, also an active member of an anti-spam political group, “If political parties resort to mass emails of this sort during the forthcoming General Election campaign, they are likely to find the activity counter-productive. It appears to be based on the spammer’s principle that it is so cheap to send email that issuing millions of them for the odd positive response is worth it.”
According to noted anti-spam authority Steve Linford, “If they think they are only mailing people who have genuinely signed up but haven’t that’s one thing. It could be they have a dirty list and need to have a strong word with their marketing people. But if it’s just a broadcast to all sorts of addresses then that’s just blatant spamming.” Regardless, according to Linford, Tony Blair’s party is now in breach of both the London Internet Exchange’s policies, and the policies of all UK-based Internet service providers.
While denying that they did anything wrong, Britain’s Labour party seemed to be unavailable for any further comment.
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This story has been lifted almost in its entirety from UK online news service silicon.com. The quotes all come from the original silicon.com story and no further investigation has been done into this story. This is just plagiary. A bit rich really – an article about one form of online crime which blatantly commits another.
Dear Ian Wilson,
Your allegations are *completely* untrue and unfounded. The only text *not* completely original in this article are the direct quotes. And Aunty doesn’t know about where *you* are from, but here in the United States not only is one expected to quote accurately, but to alter a direct quote, putting words in someone else’s mouth, can lead tp charges of defamation. Please remember that reading comprehension is your friend (on second thought, apparenly not).
Kissy kissy,
Aunty Spam