Euro politician spams fellow MEPs

European politician and anti-spam campaigner, Elly Plooij, has been left somewhat red-faced after admitting that she spammed 1,000 mail boxes at the European Parliament with a massive 3MB file.

Ms Plooij, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from Holland, sent an invitation advertising a search engine product on behalf of Cap Gemini/Ernst & Young.

One Euro insider said that the invitation to a sales pitch stretched to some 15-pages and contained a number of "flashy images" and was not greeted well by all recipients.

Ms Plooij, who also happens to be the Chairperson of the European Parliament's "Internet Foundation" which charges business as much as E15,000 (£9,000) a year to join this talking shop, told The Register that while it looked "very commercial" and "looked like spamming", it wasn't.

"The product was a personalised search engine and I thought it was something the [other MEPs] should know about," she said.

Which is fine (as long as all spammers don't use this excuse) but what about the sheer size of the invitation. In hindsight, perhaps a simple text invitation would have been sufficient, said Ms Plooij.

"Anyone can make a mistake," she said. ®