Legal Research

Spam and the Toronto Mayoralty Campaign

By David Cheifetz

I’m trying to find out why I’ve received, on my office email, last week, political spam in the form of a few messages that purported to be email from Rob Ford’s campaign, whining about his treatment by the Toronto Star.

I assume that was part of mass emailing. There’d be no reason to specifically send that form of email to me. I’m as likely to vote for Ford as would have been for, say, Jakobek. One of my partners? Maybe. Me? No.

Assuming the email is from his campaign, directly or indirectly, I wonder what list of email addresses it purchased and is using and, if it’s using that list properly, or if they used some sort of spider to troll for email addresses or it’s using email addresses from, say, a legal directory.

The email purported to be sent from “rob@robfordformayor.ca“. www.robfordmayor.ca is Ford’s website.

So, if you don’t mind, who else, here, received one or more of those emails last week?

If this is a Ford campaign stunt, does anyone think that Mr. Ford received advice (from somebody qualified to give that advice, whether paid or not) about (1) whether it was legal to send out a mass emailing of that sort; (2) whether it was ethical to do so; and (3) that regardless of the answers to (1) or (2) that he should do it anyway because the only people who would complain are those who think he’s a jack*ss, so who cares?

On the other hand, capital “s” Spam isn’t associated with high quality meat, so maybe it’s fitting that the Ford campaign is resorting to spam tactics. 

Anyway, the “rob@robfordformayor.ca” email address and the related website are now in my blocked sender’s list, so anything from address will be consigned to junk mail.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on July 17, 2010 (boomark / email).