Epending

The generic "you are a registered voter and we want to spam you" items (Here and here) are interesting in that they are almost certainly examples of epending. So far as I know, I never gave my email address to the Rensselaer County voter registration folks, and I'm pretty sure the recipient of the Richman for Treasurer item didn't either.
So where did they get these addresses? Why, they epended! What is epending? It's the somewhat widespread practice of mining the web trying to match up email addresses with individuals. It's hideously unreliable and generally discredited amongst competent email professionals, and highly regarded by a subset of marketing wonks.
You can guess what I think of political campaigns who hire epending firms.