Since permission has been granted . . .
What Paul Hackett was requesting was spam.
Maneuver Warfare
Leave aside any questions of Paul Hackett himself or the campaign. I am not maligning the man, I supported his candidacy, and I'm bitterly, bitterly disappointed that he lost.
He did not ask "Send email to everyone who you think might be persuaded to vote for me." He said
I need all of you to send an email to everyone you know [emphasis added], and ask them to send it to everyone they know[emphasis added]. If we can spread this virally to around 2 million people, statistically around 5,000 voters in the district will get an email from somebody they know asking them to vote for me on Tuesday.
That, my friends, is spam.
From spamhouse.org
The Definition of Spam
The word "Spam" as applied to Email means Unsolicited Bulk Email ("UBE").
Unsolicited means that the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent. Bulk means that the message is sent as part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantively identical content.
A message is Spam only if it is both Unsolicited and Bulk.
- Unsolicited Email is normal email
(examples: first contact enquiries, job enquiries, sales enquiries)
- Bulk Email is normal email
(examples: subscriber newsletters, customer communications, discussion lists)
. . .
Spam is an issue about consent, not content. Whether the UBE message is an advert, a scam, porn, a begging letter or an offer of a free lunch, the content is irrelevant - if the message was sent unsolicited and in bulk then the message is spam.
Spam is not a sub-set of UBE, it is not "UBE that is also a scam or that doesn't contain an unsubscribe link", all email sent unsolicited and in bulk is Spam.
http://www.spamhaus.org/definition.html
His request meets the two criteria: UNSOLICITED and BULK.
If you are sending it to everyone in your address book, it's bulk.
Unless they all specifically asked you to send it, it's unsolicited.
Or, since someone complained about using the spamhaus definition, how about this one from spamlinks:
http://spamlinks.net/faqs.htm
"Internet spam is one or more unsolicited messages,
sent or posted as part of a larger collection of messages,
all having substantially identical content"
Still fits.
Or wikipedia:
Spamming is the use of any electronic communications medium to send unsolicited messages in bulk.
All of these definitions concur that mass and indiscriminate emailings are spam. It doesn't matter if it was sent with the best intentions of the world. It's spam. In the pantheon of spam, it certainly doesn't rank anywhere near Viagra ads and porn and the Nigerian scam; if they're Uzis, this is a kid with a cap gun (I'm dating myself; do these even still exist?), but it's still spam.
Most people seem to have picked and chosen who they sent to. Sending to selected people for a specific purpose is not spam, and no one is saying it is. Targeted emails sent to people with some reasonable point of tangency -- they live in Ohio, or they're political connexions -- are not the issue. That is targeted email, and it can be -- and probably was -- very effective. But that's not what was requested; Hackett specifically requested everyone send to everyone, and espoused this as a general political tactic.
The mathematics of this kind of scheme only take into account the total potential of the tree, and only work if everyone follows through completely. In order for the "six degrees of separation" model to work, you must send it to everyone. You don't know who else those people you know might know. And then they must send it to everyone. And so on for every iteration down the chain. Any one who doesn't participate prunes the tree, with the net result that you get far fewer than the 2 million viewers Hackett cited.
And yes, you can spam people you know. I have a good friend, who just doesn't get it, and will never get it, and sends every urban legend and every dumb bogus petition and every Hallmark-inspirational "Send this to everyone you know who needs a smile!" chain-letter to everyone she knows. No matter how many times different people on that list have gently chided her about this, she does it anyway. What I get from her is spam. Just because my email's spam filters don't catch it doesn't mean it's not spam. Just because it's done with the best intentions in the world doesn't mean it's not spam. Just because she's my friend doesn't mean it's not spam.
Spam alienates people. Commercial spam works in part because spammers DON'T CARE whether they antagonise their recipients. The folks selling viagra don't care if the people who discard their email are pissed. But political spam has consequences from the animosity it generates.
I think that Hackett had the best of intentions in suggesting his mass email plan, but a tactic like this is almost guaranteed to backfire.
As for pushing off diaries on this topic until after the Hackett election . . . well, I'm new to Kos and feel constrained to offer criticism of people who have been here for years. But I must say that self-censorship disturbs me. OTOH, it did allow me to polish up my initial scattered thoughts. . .