Tim Eyman acquires email list of Democratic activists, begins sending them his propaganda

Hav­ing decid­ed he’s not enough of a pub­lic nui­sance, dis­graced ini­tia­tive pro­mot­er Tim Eyman today sent a large list of Demo­c­ra­t­ic activists a copy of his lat­est email appeal, which is for the most part a rehashed ver­sion of what he sent on Mon­day announc­ing his lat­est scheme to dev­as­tate pub­lic ser­vices, I‑1550.

We know about this because NPI sup­port­ers have been con­tact­ing us all morn­ing long telling us they got an email from Tim Eyman and won­der­ing why, since they nev­er signed up to receive any emails from Eyman or his associates.

We inves­ti­gat­ed and dis­cov­ered that Eyman has cre­at­ed a list in his MailChimp account called “DEMOCRATS”. We don’t know where he acquired the list from (or whether he obtained it legal­ly), but it appears to be of a sub­stan­tial size, judg­ing by the num­ber of activists who have con­tact­ed us already.

It is against MailChim­p’s Terms of Use to send peo­ple email with­out per­mis­sion. Sec­tion 17 (Gen­er­al Rules) of the TOS states:

You promise to fol­low these rules:

1. You won’t send Spam! By “spam,” we mean the def­i­n­i­tion on the Spamhaus web­site.
2. You won’t use pur­chased, rent­ed, or third-par­ty lists of email addresses.
3. You won’t vio­late our Accept­able Use Pol­i­cy, which is part of this Agreement.
4. If you use our API, you’ll com­ply with our API Use Pol­i­cy.

If you vio­late any of these rules, then we may sus­pend or ter­mi­nate your account.

MailChimp requires that peo­ple who import address­es in bulk tell MailChimp where they got their list, so Eyman would have been asked that at the time he uploaded all of the email address­es he acquired — but of course, he’s a com­pul­sive liar, so it’s very pos­si­ble he was less than truth­ful with MailChimp.

Eyman has relied on unso­licit­ed email for years to spread his pro­pa­gan­da, and elect­ed offi­cials are fair­ly used to get­ting mes­sages they did­n’t ask for from him, but what exact­ly he thinks he’s accom­plish­ing by blast­ing his mis­sives into the inbox­es of pro­gres­sive activists and Demo­c­ra­t­ic PCOs is unclear.

Eyman pref­aced his email with the following:

Hel­lo. We recent­ly added a mas­sive num­ber of new emails to our list. Each week, we send out two infor­ma­tive email updates. If you want to keep get­ting them, you don’t need to do any­thing. If you don’t, the unsub­scribe but­ton appears at the bot­tom. Have a great day!

Send­ing unso­licit­ed email isn’t ille­gal, but providers like MailChimp have fair­ly com­pre­hen­sive terms of use poli­cies, and Eyman is required to fol­low those.

We believe that Eyman may have vio­lat­ed MailChim­p’s terms of ser­vice by import­ing and using a third par­ty list of email address­es, and we’ve asked MailChimp to inves­ti­gate and take appro­pri­ate action to enforce its TOS.