When registering to vote, do not put your email address.
I got spammed today by some podunk political campaign for their candidate. At the fine print was this:
“A message from Winvotes.com This email is being sent to you because you voluntarily listed your email address on your voter registration form, which is public information for political campaigns, journalistic or educational research.”
Bastards…
Update: Another lesson to never make your email publicly available anywhere. It’s ridiculous how spammers are able to get at us – perfect market theory must be. Makes me want to go out and vote for his opponent just to cancel out one of the votes that he gets.
Please note the return e-mail address I used. It’s really a temporary, disposable e-mail address that will forward 3 messages to my real one, and no more. The part before the first period is the actual temporary e-mail address, which serves to tell me where the replies originated. The wonderful people at SpamGourmet.com offer this as a free service (truly free — not even ads, though contributions are welcome). I have gotten about 6 spam messages total since I started using them for public postings. Go thou and do likewise!
Thanks for the tip. I’ll check it out.
This same company is running the same kind of spam campaign in Los Angeles… Anyone in CA should follow this same advice — don’t give out your email address when registering online. Some details on my own battle with these dorks is chronicled at the link below.