Venice on the web
A semi-regular column

RELATED:
E-mail to tourists: please come back
Sarasota County Visitors Bureau starts a "grassroots e-mail campaign;" local chambers, pols smile and give a thumbs up
-- Venice Gondolier Sun, 11/17/04
Sarasota spams, mends evil ways
Venice Florida! dot com gets a nice mention
-- Wired, 11/22/04

11/24/04 UPDATE: Shortly before this article was published, the Sarasota County Visitors Bureau pulled the spam-sending capabilities from the below-referenced page. On Monday, 11/22/04, Wired picked up on the story (see above link), reporting that the SCVB had removed the spam generator, thus mending their "evil ways." The SCVB's spam generator was back up and online as of Wednesday morning, 11/24/04, with the additional feature of an input box requesting both the e-mail addresses of the person requesting that the spam be sent and the intended recipient. The SCVB also (finally) adopted a privacy policy, something that had been missing up until Venice Florida! dot com started climbing on their backs.

Our take? You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it think.

"Have you got anything without spam?"
According to an article that appeared in the Venice Gondolier Sun (linked to above), the Sarasota County Visitors Bureau wants your help in their latest advertising campaign. This new campaign involves a "grassroots e-mail campaign to bolster the county's tourism business." What the SCVB wants you to do is to enter in the e-mail addresses of your friends and family so that they can receive unsolicited e-mail advertisements from the SCVB, telling your friends and family what a wonderful place Sarasota County is.

What the SCVB is specifically trying to do is counter the image that all of Florida was wiped out by this past year's hurricanes. The marketing program is aimed at informing potential visitors that all is well in Sarasota County, that there was no hurricane damage here and that business, specifically the tourism business, is back to business as usual. Thus, the "grassroots e-mail campaign."

Grassroots e-mail campaign? Try again, folks.

Christian recording artist Amy Grant tried this a few years back, complete with a contest for fans who sent out the most e-mails. This earned Grant the nickname spAmy Grant for a time and resulted in some very bad national press.

So how did the SCVB come up with this bright idea? According to recent news accounts, the SCVB managed to get a bundled grant from the state intended for use in promoting tourism in Florida. Then the SCVB assembled a crack team of local media and marketing experts. One of the great ideas these experts came up with? You guessed it: spam.

Nevermind articles like this one that appear daily in newspapers across the country that decry spam as an evil. These media experts can be forgiven for not reading the media trades that have vilified spam on a daily basis for years. But you'd have thought that one of these experts might have picked up a newspaper and read a news story about Jeremy Jaynes. Jaynes was just sentenced to nine years in prison for (gulp) sending out spam.

"Well, there's spam, egg, sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it."
Virginia Haley, executive director of SCVB, acknowledged that none of her experts had pointed out that the marketing program might be construed as spam. "Preposterous," Haley exclaimed, when asked about the SCVB's spam generator. "When I go on to the Washington Post's web site and send out an article to my mother, is that spam? No, and neither is this."

Which is, of course, a near-idiotic false analogy. The Washington Post's articles are just that -- articles. While their pages may contain ads, the primary purpose of any given page is informational content, i.e., news stories. In contrast, the SCVB's advert page is an unabashed advert and nothing more. Moreover, the Post hasn't gone to other media outlets and asked that everyone e-mail off one particular article to all of their friends and family.

Haley refused to acknowledge in any way, shape or form that the SCVB is engaging in spamming activities. She refused to even consider the possibility and was quite indignant that I would even raise the issue.

I tried out the SCVB's spam generator. The first thing I noticed was the lack of any privacy statement. There was no indication that either SCVB or Miles Media would not collect, save and sell the e-mail addresses to a third party. The SCVB web site also has an e-card page that collects e-mail addresses -- again, no privacy statement is evident on the page. An e-card page with no privacy statement is usually a good indicator that the purpose of the page is to harvest e-mail addresses for resale to other spammers, which is why anyone who sends me an e-card usually gets a very nasty response from me.

Anyway, I put my name in the input box (I could have used any name or phrase that I cared to), and then my valid e-mail address. It generated an e-mail that route traced back to milesmediagroup.net, which has a very strange home page. Their real domain name, not given in the spam header, is www.milesmediagroup.com.

Other than my name, which I had voluntarily provided on the input form, there was no other route trace information in the e-mail that I received to indicate that it was really me who sent it. This means I could probably put just about anything in the sender's box, and the receiver of the spam would have no clue who really caused the spam to be generated unless the sender truthfully identified him/herself.

Heh.

Heh heh.

You should be able to smell this next one coming.

"Could you do the egg, bacon, spam and sausage without the spam then?"
I then tried sending a spam to myself with an insult. I chose for my name "Go f*** yourself" (I used the real word in the input box, not the one with asterisks). And here's the spam I received, with header info (again, I deleted the real word when reproducing it below and used asterisks instead):

Hidden header information:
Received: from web1.milesmediagroup.net (milesmediaweb1.packagedmanaged.ihost.com [170.224.248.195] (may be forged))
Received: (from nobody@localhost)
by web1.milesmediagroup.net (8.11.6/8.11.6) id iAJFSAD25549;
Fri, 19 Nov 2004 10:28:10 -0500
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2004 10:28:10 -0500
Message-Id: <200411191528.iAJFSAD25549@web1.milesmediagroup.net>

From: Sarasota Convention & Visitors Bureau <info@sarasotafl.org>
To: jpatten@veniceflorida.com
Subject: Go f*** yourself wants you to know about Sarasota and Her Islands!

Sarasota and Her Islands :: Imagination. Creation. Vacation.

The sun is shining bright as ever. The fish are hungry. And the sand is as white as you could imagine. If you didnt know, our area has seen three hurricanes this summer, but youd never be able to tell. Sure, the power flickered off and on, but a fresh tropical breeze was all Sarasota and her islands saw of the summer storms. In fact, our Reading Festival and the tasty Stone Crab Festival are happening in the next month. (As if you needed another reason to come.)
So, if you have a trip to the Sarasota area planned, relax. If you dont have one planned, why not? From the white sands of Siesta Key to the shops and cafs of St. Armands Circle, theres as much to do, to dine on and to discover as always.

To find out more, request a new Sarasota Visitors Guide, or view a live web cam of one of our beautiful beaches, visit: www.sarasotafl.org or call 1-800-522-9799.

Email this page to a friend:
Your name Friend's email

October 2004 Photo Tour of Sarasota
From Jungle Gardens to Casperson Beach, all is well with Sarasota and Her Islands.

"I'll have your spam, I love it. I'm having spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam!"
Note that there is no way to report the spam as unwanted or as spam abuse to the originating ISP (internet service provider). Additionally, the text-only version of the spam that I received did not contain the required legal opt-out option. The given return e-mail address in the hidden part of the header source code is fictional -- nobody@localhost. So not only is it spam, it's arguably illegal spam due to the bogus e-mail address in the header and the lack of opt-out information.

Thanks to the ability to send out the spam anonymously, the annoyance possibilities are endless. I pointed that out to Haley as well when I explained to her that I was able to generate a spam with the phrase "go f*** yourself" in it. Haley totally missed the point of what I was trying to tell her: "Yeah, well, it's only people with a vulgar mind like yours that would think of something like that."

I tried to tell Haley that the only reason that I tried it was because other sites had been used for just such a purpose in the past, like George W. Bush's online campaign sign generator -- this became a famous internet joke with thousands of people creating online signs that were not very complimentary to our sitting President. Haley didn't want to hear it, she was apparently convinced that I was some 18-year-old troublemaker bent on trying to wreck a wonderful promotion that is intended to bring wondrous things to the county.

Then there's the content of the spam itself, the message that the SCVB is trying to get out. After reading the spam, I am quite confidant that the SCVB is not a drug-free workplace. The power flickered? A fresh tropical breeze? I have no idea what part of the county these people were in during Charley and Jeanne. I spent four hours picking up mobile home roofing material that blew into the parking lot where I live, this after Jeanne. The mobile home park is several blocks away. That's some damned breeze. I can't wait to see what happens when we get a few winds.

"Baked beans are off."
There's big bucks involved here. The SCVB contracted it out to a media company after their own media experts gave it a thumbs up, the county is behind it, even the county commissioners are supposedly backing this. The state may even have funded this baby (I'm still checking on that angle).

The county commissioners?

Yup, according to the Gondo article.

So I sent one off to County Commissioner Jon Thaxton, using the name "spam spam spam spam" (forgive me, Jon, but I just couldn't resist).

Then I did what everyone else (individuals, corporations, e-mail providers, etc.) is going to do once they receive one of these e-mails. I added it to my spam-filter, which means I'll never receive another e-mail, legitimate or spam, from the SCVB. Neither will anyone else whose ISP starts filtering e-mail from the SCVB domain based on this spam, and that's the real damage that the SCVB did to themselves quite unwittingly -- they may have seriously limited their own communication abilities in the future because of this promotion.

The Gondo article also stated that various local chambers of commerce were backing the spam campaign. Gail Loefgren, of the Longboat Key Chamber of Commerce, said that while she is opposed to spam, what the SCVB is doing is not spam: "I got an e-mail from them, opened it up, looked at it and I liked what read."

John Ryan, exec director of the Venice Area Chamber of Commerce, was not nearly as enthusiastic about SCVB's marketing strategies. He wasn't thrilled about the spam aspect, but that was only one issue: "Their advertising doesn't represent the whole county. It's not just Venice and the south county area that is misrepresented, but the county as a whole. In their e-mail ad, the only reference to south county is Caspersen Beach, and how many people really recognize where Caspersen is?"

Ryan went on to say that the Venice chamber isn't promoting the SCVB's e-mail program, rather they have an online tour on their web site that shows that Venice was unaffected by the hurricanes and that everything is fine and normal in Venice.

"Well, could I have her spam instead of the baked beans then?"
What Ryan didn't point out: the SCVB is so out of touch with south county that they are apparently unaware of how to spell Caspersen in their advertisements -- it's spelled "Casperson" on their site and in their spam (note: within an hour of initial publication of this article, the spelling was corrected on the web site).

Finn Caspersen would be so... not proud.

Sigh.

John Patten is the head of Web Operations for Creative Pages, and has worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times.