Iain Dale: Spammer
In January 2006, about 2 hours before this post went live, Iain Dale sent out bulk unsolicited email to an unknown number of bloggers, seeking a link exchange. It read as follows:
----- Original Message -----
From: Iain Dale
To: [unknown]
Sent: Sunday, January 29, 2006 4:30 PM
Subject: Blog
> Hi, I've just been looking at your blog and I wondered if you'd like to
> add a link to mine? It's at http://www.iaindale.blogspot.com.
> If you do add one please let me know and I'll reciprocate - I'm getting
> several thousand hits a day now, so it should drive a bit of traffic your
> way.
Now, there are some grey areas when it comes to spamming, but Spamhaus helpfully nails down what is black and what is white here by identifying spam as email that is both unsolicited and bulk.
When confronted about his spamming, Iain (finally) had this to say:
"I have looked on Tim Ireland's site and he quotes three emails from me. They stem from January 2006 when I restarted the blog. One of them starts with the words Dear Tim. Hardly likely to be spam, then is it. Then there are two others with roughly the same message but which start with Hi, rather than a named greeting. I do recall emailing various bloggers at the time to tell them my blog had restarted and asking them to reinstate links to me or link for the first time in return for a link to my blog. Hardly a crime is it? Would it really matter if I sent 10 separate emails or 10 grouped together? It was over a year ago, for christ sake and if you expect me to remember I don't. Obviously some people keep their emails and sent items going back 10 years. Tim Ireland is one of them. Well bully for him." - Iain Dale
1. Evidence was produced to identify four recipients, not three... and it is very unlikely that these were the only emails sent. Still, Iain is a born politician and far too smart to volunteer any material beyond the evidence to hand*.
2. A personalised spam is still spam.
3. In no part of the email does Iain announce a return to blogging, and he certainly doesn't do so in the casual/acceptable way that he suggests.
5. *10? What happened to 3?
6. No, it doesn't really matter if some of the emails were sent individually; they were generic in nature and therefore can be classified as a bulk communication. But the majority were sent in bulk, anyway. It's still spam, no matter how finely you slice it.
7. Also note how a year suddenly becomes a decade, which then becomes a smear about the 'obsessive' nature of the investigating party. Clever.
8. If Iain Dale does not keep records of emails he sent a year ago, then he is in the minority.
If you're a blogger who (*gasp*) keeps emails from a year ago or more, then here's something you might like to try:
Search your email archives for an email from 'iaindale.com' with message text that includes; 'I've just been looking at your blog'.
If you don't find a copy of the spam listed above in your email archives, don't feel bad... chances are it ended up on the wrong side of your spam filter.
But if you do find one, please check in... and feel free to use this nifty badge on your weblog by copying and pasting the code below:
