Is Tony Blair a spammer?

The Labour Party has been accused of sending out unsolicited emails, leading to concern among anti-spam campaigners and attracting fresh criticism from political rivals.

The emails purport to come from Tony Blair and include the subject line 'Help stop the Tories attacking our NHS'. Labour has admitted sending the emails but denies any wrongdoing, claiming all recipients had requested the emails.

The emails begins 'Dear Labour supporter' but a number of recipients have told silicon.com they have never signed up for email alerts from Labour and are most certainly not Labour supporters – perhaps the most notable among them is Richard Allan, Liberal Democrat MP for Sheffield Hallam.

Allan, also a member of the All Party Internet Group which campaigns against spam, told silicon.com: "If political parties resort to mass emails of this sort during the forthcoming General Election campaign, they are likely to find the activity counter-productive."

"It appears to be based on the spammer's principle that it is so cheap to send email that issuing millions of them for the odd positive response is worth it," he added. "But selling political policies is not like selling Viagra substitutes. If the commercial spammers annoy a million people but make a few quid then they count that a success."

"A political party that annoys thousands by spamming will pay a price for that."

An initial enquiry into Labour Party HQ was met with a denial that any of emails sent were unsolicited. silicon.com was told all emails were either requested via the website or as part of membership to the Labour Party.

However, the experience of a number of readers would suggest otherwise.

Anti-spam campaigner Steve Linford from SpamHaus told silicon.com: "If they think they are only mailing people who have genuinely signed up but haven't that's one thing. It could be they have a dirty list and need to have a strong word with their marketing people. But if it's just a broadcast to all sorts of addresses then that's just blatant spamming."

Either way, Linford said the Labour Party is in breach of all UK service provider policy, the London Internet Exchange (Linx) policy and SpamHaus' own best practice.

However, the party is not technically in breach of the law "due to a giant loophole" put in place by the current Labour government, which permits certain forms of bulk mail to private email addresses, according to Linford.

Irrespective of legality Linford claims Labour "should be setting an example" – especially while some its own MPs attempt to draft stronger anti-spam legislation.

"Labour should stop sending these mailings immediately and work out where it went wrong. At best this is really bad marketing."

At the time of writing, The Labour Party had failed to respond to an email and further telephone request for comment on how the email addresses were harvested.

But it appears the database may have been created in part thanks to slight liberties with email addresses submitted elsewhere.

One silicon.com reader said his organisation had been involved in events at last year's Labour conference in the course of business rather than support or endorsement. He said it was never agreed that their contact details would be used for "sending unsolicited emails" and branded the emails as "spam".

Similarly silicon.com also received a number of the emails, though likely due to presence on media lists which are often traded fairly openly by marketing companies.

Richard Allan MP believes he received the unsolicited email after signing up for The Big Conversation website – a public consultation website on government policy. However, he says signing up for the site should not have been assumed to be a show of support for the Labour Party or an invitation to be sent bulk email to the address provided during sign-up.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard was heavily criticised during his general election campaign last year for sending spam – once by phone and once via email.