Graduate student bemoans use of e-mail in elections

Dear Editor:

As a member of the graduate student body, I would like to voice my open protest and disgust with Tennessee Traditions and their candidate Jeremy Durham. Durham has had third-party spam e-mails sent on his behalf to the entire student body. The originating domain and a link within the message advertising textbooksfirst.com “a new Web site that tells you the ‘required textbooks’ for UT classes” and a short message from “Lisa Lynn” imploring me to vote for Jeremy Durham in the current SGA elections.

A little investigation of publicly available Internet records indicates that the parties behind this spam include John McGary, a junior in Speech Communication here at UT. He also owns the textbooksfirst.com domain and has a link to another domain called premierespeakers.com which is referenced in his Directory information here at the university. McGary is prominent on campus as a member of the College Republicans.

How did Durham get the over 25,000 e-mail addresses that this spam could have potentially reached? Did he contract McGary to do it? Did he get these addresses directly from the SGA or did he “mine” the directory database, a clear violation of UT’s usage policies? These are questions that The Daily Beacon as the “editorially independent” campus newspaper should be asking.

I did not opt-in or give permission to either of these gentlemen to use or disseminate my e-mail address for their political purposes. This is a violation of the CAN-SPAM act and should at least earn them a frogwalk before student judicial affairs.

Both Durham and McGary should publicly answer for this act.

Toby Martin Applegate

Graduate student

Department of Geography