portside.org: Unsolicited Political Email?

On 22 Sep 2004, I received the following email (trimmed for brevity):

Subject: Welcome to the "portside" mailing list
From: portside-request@lists.portside.org
To: zantolak@comcast.net
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 03:06:29 -0400

We thought that you would be interested in receiving
portside.

Portside is a way in which peace and social & economic
justice activists exchange information and respond to
the current crises.

More information on portside is below. If we made a
mistake and portside is not of value or interest to
you, or if you are swamped with e-mail, you can
unsubscribe by going to:
http://lists.portside.org/mailman/listinfo/portside.
and following the prompts for unsubbing; or by sending
an email to:  support@portside.org

Later that day, in the span of only 10 minutes, I received 5 emails from the list, regarding striking hotel workers, John Kerry and the Democratic Party, an "election-day protection" project know as "This Time We're Watching", a cut in housing aid for the poor, and even a message from Michael Moore.

So, this mailing list just randomly subscribes me because they "thought I would be interested". Strange, considering I've never used my email address for anything that would indicate I was a "peace and social & economic justice activist". So not only do I receive the initial subscription message, but I'll also be receiving these emails at whatever interval they send them, indefinitely. And this was completely unrequested. It looks like portside.org is spamming!

I went to the portside.org FAQ to see what this was all about. How about that:

What is portside?

portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news, discussion and debate service of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to provide varied material of interest to people on the left -- things that will help them to interpret the world, and to change it.

Not only are they spammers, they're socialist spammers!

On the off chance that J. Random Commie decided to subscribe my email to this list, I checked their Subscribe, Unsubscribe and Manage Your Account page:

Subscribe to portside by filling out the following form. You will be sent email requesting confirmation, to prevent others from gratuitously subscribing you.

That's odd, I never received a confirmation email. So I'm on this list, yet I never subscribed, and nobody subscribed me. They just "thought I would be interested". Thank goodness for Thunderbird; anything with a sender containing "portside.org" gets sent to the trash.

If anyone else has been spammed by them, please contact me at the address given above.