Judy Myers is an un-American spammer

I've been on the Internet long enough to remember when spam wasn't a problem. I remember when you could share your email address without fear of having it sold and shared and getting tons of emails for V!agra and Cia!is and Va1uable Mor1gage Offers. The world has changed; I've had to abandon one email account because it was so spammed and my Gmail and Yahoo accounts have a combined 1500 spam emails between them at this very moment.

Yes, I'm very particular about these things, and getting additional spam from supposedly-reputable organizations pisses me off. No, I'm not a BOFH, myself, but I know what responsible list management entails, and it's not that difficult to do.

So this week, you can understand why I was upset to find in my inbox a spam message from Judy Myers, currently running for State Senator.

TRUTH ALERT from Sen. Judy Myers

Hi there!

My name is Judy Myers, and I’m running for the Senate from the 52nd district. During the past year, I’ve been honored to meet many of you, and discuss the issues facing our area.

Blah, blah, blah. So I sent off a complaint via SpamCop, not that I will suspect it will do any good. Then I noticed something odd. Not only is Myers's website not hosted in our very own Champaign-Urbana, or in her home of Danville, or anywhere in the United States at all. It's hosted in Germany. Remarkably hypocritical coming from someone whose website says about jobs:

By raising more than 300 hidden taxes and fees, state government has driven away thousands of high quality jobs to Indiana, Kentucky and other states. I will work with colleagues on both sides of the aisle to create an economic climate friendly to small businesses and job creation.

So, apparently Myers objects to driving jobs to neighboring states, but overseas is just fine.

Here's the data, for those of you so technically-minded

judymyers2006.com = 82.165.239.223 (has no rDNS, naturally)

Here's the whois info on that IP address: (edited for space)

whois -h whois.ripe.net 82.165.239.223

inetnum: 82.165.224.0 - 82.165.239.255
netname: SCHLUND-CUSTOMERS
descr: Schlund + Partner AG
remarks: in case of abuse or spam, please mailto: abuse@schlund.de
remarks: For abuse issues, please use only abuse@schlund.com
remarks: For NOC issues, please look at our AS 8560
e-mail: abuse@schlund.com
phone: +49 721 91374 50
fax-no: +49 721 91374 20

And just to be careful, I did a traceroute:

  9    71 ms    75 ms     *     ae-2.ebr2.NewYork1.Level3.net [4.69.132.66]
 10    56 ms    56 ms    62 ms  ae-23-52.car3.NewYork1.Level3.net [4.68.97.50]
 11    67 ms    61 ms    58 ms  level3-up.nyc.schlund.net [4.78.164.2]
 12    58 ms    59 ms    60 ms  217.160.229.106
 13    59 ms    61 ms    56 ms  217.160.229.38
 14    58 ms     *       58 ms  82.165.239.223

There really is no way to tell exactly where a server is located from its IP address, but you can see above that at hop #10, it hits New York, and everything after that is owned by schlund.net or schlund.de. The schlund.net webpage redirects to the schlund.de page, in German.