Statement on Spam and VoteNader.org

Spam from VoteNader.org?

(Or naderexplore04.org)

You may have received spam email recently that appears to come from our campaign, or be about our campaign — perhaps the "From" and or "Reply-to" addresses look like they are coming from VoteNader.org. Or perhaps you have received a message that appears to come from an individual (if the address is real, the real owner probably did not send this email either) with suppressed recipients. Or maybe you received an email that appeared to come from yourself promoting our site.

These messages are NOT from Nader for President 2004, and these email tactics are NOT condoned by our campaign in any way.

UPDATE: Some of the latest forged emails have been made to appear to be coming from naderexplore04.org. Again, we are not responsible for this unfortunate abuse of email, and there is little in the technical sense that we can do to prevent this as it has nothing to do with our actual infrastructure. We are collecting information.

NOTE: The emails with malicious code (viruses, worms, etc.) often have attachments. Our campaign will NEVER send attachments in our announcement emails to you. Please be sure that you have anti-virus software and have the latest updates available for your anti-virus software.

Our hosting service has alerted us to say that Nader for President 2004 appears to be the target of what is called a "Joe Job." Such an event is where a spammer forges email to make it appear to have come from some other domain (such as ours — or yourself). This is hard to prevent on our end and part of the insecure nature of the email protocol in general.

Members of our actual email list must request to receive email from us (either through Ralph's signup sheets or subscribing during our exploratory phase, or now on our campaign site). When one signs up for email they must reply to a confirmation message before they receive our list announcements.

Our public announcement emails come from "campaign@votenader.org," contain a "Paid for by Nader for President 2004" statement at the bottom, and have "updates@lists.votenader.org" in the "To:" header. Unfortunately, some of these indicators can be forged as well.

Most of the Spam that we have received complaints about appear to be forged from email addresses not associated with votenader.org (often forged to appear to be coming from government email addresses), and have our website code embedded in the body of the email with hidden tags that contain random words that work to subvert anti-spam software.

If you are on our lists, you can ALWAYS unsubscribe at ANY time by following the instructions included at the end of our announcements. You can also use our unsubscribe page using the email address you signed up with.

If you are receiving this SPAM, we extend our apologies.

We will pursue the spammers to the full extent of the law.

For more information, please review these resources:

• How Do I Determine the Source of an Email?
• Why Does This Spam Look Like I Sent It?
• Coping with a Joe Job

Please contact abuse@votenader.org with any questions. We have received many samples of the spam and are working to identify the source, if possible.