Political insanity with email

In one of the more boneheaded email related moves I’ve seen from a political group ever the Obama / Biden campaign has announced that people can go to their website, enter in the email address of a Republican friend, pay some money, and the campaign will send an email to your (soon to be ex-) friend on your behalf.

This holiday season, we’re giving you a chance to have a little fun at the expense of a Republican in your life by letting them know they inspired you to make a donation to the Obama campaign.
Simply enter their name and email address below. Then, we’ll send them a message letting them know they inspired you to donate. (Don’t worry—we won’t hold on to any of their information.) Obama for America

To quote a friend of mine: “WHAT THE … I DON’T EVEN”
This is going to cause massive delivery nightmares. Do you really think recipients of these emails are not going to hit “This is spam” or complain or block the sender? I have no doubt this list is going to be full of spamtraps and IPs are going to get listed on numerous blocklists and blocked by a bunch of ISPs. And then, THEN we’re going to get the complaints from Obama for America about how evil and anti-American the ISPs and spam filtering companies are for blocking their mail.
If I were a real conspiracy theorist, I’d say that, somehow, the blocking would be turned into Yet Another Law trying to regulate the Internet. It would be named something catchy that has a “meaningful” acronym. Like the “Barring Online Networks from Hindering Elected Americans Deploying Email Dialog” (BONEHEADED act). Or the “Open Access to Political Dialog” (OAPD act).
This is so not going to end well.

Email marketing OF THE FUTURE!
Put a fork in it

Related Posts

Fines for not honoring unsubscribes

Virgin Blue has been fined $110,000 by the Australian government for not honoring unsubscribes.

Read More

White House sending spam?

There has been some press about political spam recently. People are receiving email from the White House that they have not opted into. At a recent press conference a reporter challenged the press secretary to defend the practice.
Chris Wheeler over at Bronto blog points out that CAN SPAM doesn’t apply as this is political mail, and CAN SPAM only covers commercial email. He also notes that most of the mail came from “forward to a friend” links which the sender has little to no control over.
Gawker has a post up “Everything you need to know about Obama’s Spam-Gate.”
There are a lot of issues here. Chris asks a number of questions on his blog, that I encourage people to think about.

Read More

The dark side of email marketing

Everyone I talk to when dealing with issues inevitably has to tell me they are legitimate email marketers. They’re not spammers, they’re just business people. I often find it difficult to fathom why they need to tell me this. It’s not like email marketers are criminals or anything.
Two recent stories reminded me how evil some folks are. While I’ve not had any direct contact (that I know of) with any of the players on this end of things I have zero doubt that if they called me they would tell me that they were legitimate email marketers.
In one case, a members of a spam gang kidnapped the teenage daughter of someone investigating their activities. The gang held her for more than 5 years in horrific conditions. Yesterday Joseph Menn, author of “Fatal System Error” posted on Boing Boing that his friend got his daughter back. It is a heartbreaking story and incredibly sobering.
In another case, the Russian police arrested a man who ran spammit.com, a clearinghouse for viagra sellers to find spammers to send their mail. Reports say that mail volumes dropped by a fifth after the site was taken offline.
There is real evil in the email marketing industry. Sure, they’re spammers and we can all stand up and say they’re not legitimate. But, this is what the ISPs and Spamhaus and law enforcement are dealing with on a regular basis.

Read More