More on Newsmax and spam to political lists

Things are getting stranger and stranger with Newsmax and the politicians they’re managing lists for.  Earlier this week, recipients on Scott Brown’s list received emails with the subject line “5 Signs You’ll Get Alzheimer’s Disease.” The advertisement was for products and information from Dr. Blaylock, a contributor to Newsmax Health. Scott Brown told the political reporter at WMUR in New Hampshire that he did not authorize this email was cutting ties with Newsmax
Newsmax contacted me after I posted about unexpected email to the Herman Cain mailing list. They wanted to make it clear to me that their mailings were all double opt-in and that they adhered to all best practices. They also said that select advertisers were allowed to put ads in the body of messages from the politician to their supporters.
It seems, though, that may not be the whole truth. After I received the message from Newsmax, I signed up on caintv.com to see if they really were using double opt-in. While it is very possible that Mr. Cain was using double opt-in during the campaign, he isn’t any longer. I started receiving emails immediately, with neither a welcome message or a confirmation message.
In the case of Scott Brown’s list, the advertisement wasn’t from an outside advertiser, the advertisement was for a Newsmax columnist. And the ad wasn’t in the body of a message to supporters, it was the message to supporters. Mr. Brown has this to say about his likeness and mailing list being used by Newsmax.

While the issue of Alzheimer’s is personal to me and an issue I have been working on for years, I did not approve or authorize the sending of this particular e-mail,” Brown told [WMUR]. “Due to this and other issues, I am terminating my relationship with this vendor effective immediately. Boston.com

Newsmax has a poor reputation among a lot of recipients (google help forum, yahoo answers, complaints board) and they’re rather well known among spam fighters. They are, to put it kindly, aggressive marketers. The impression I have from Newsmax is they are the type of marketer that will push as far as they can and only pull back when it starts hurting their bottom line.

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First BACN, now SCRAPPLE

There is a lot of mail that goes out to recipients that’s not really spam, but isn’t fully wanted. To describe these different kinds of mail, people have invented pork-product related terminology. Ham and bacn are both used to describe wanted mail, although possibly not wanted right now.
Now we have SCRAPPLE. It seems over the weekend a number of members of the Science Fiction Writers Association received email from someone asking them to consider one of his writings for an award. Reading through the tweets, this person typed hundreds of email addresses out of the SFWA directory into their mail client. And then sent mail to that list.
Recipients of that mail then went to twitter to complain about abuse of their email addresses in this way. Being writers, they discussed what word that would describe “something like spam, but not really.”
@talkwordy came up with Scrapple. Now, for those of you who don’t live in a very small part of the mid-Atlantic region, you may not know what scrapple is. Scrapple is a loaf pork product made from, well, scraps of pig. It often has a weird greenish tinge to it, presumably from the liver. My grandmother, having grown up in that small part of the mid-Atlantic region, used to eat it when she could find it. Usually it was in small, country diners where the waitresses call you darlin’ or hun.
By the end of the discussion the definition of scrapple was: Unwanted email from a person you know, which is annoying but not completely irrelevant to your interests, often manual address list creation.
There you have it. Scrapple joins bacn, ham, spam, and spim to describe different kinds of email.

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Update on Herman Cain advertising male enhancement drugs

Shawn Studer from newsmax.com contacted me today with a statement about the Herman Cain mailing list.

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Email as a PR problem

Email is a great way to connect to and engage with people. It is also a medium where the sender doesn’t get to control the message as well as they might in other media. This means that sometimes email campaigns go wrong in a way that drives a national news story about how you are a spammer.
In the stress and flurry of dealing with public accusations of spamming many companies overlook the fact that the underlying issue is they are sending mail that the recipients don’t want or don’t expect. If there is a public uproar about your mail as spam, then there is a good chance something in  your email strategy isn’t working.
Even in the recent White House as spammers strategy, there is a strong chance that they are actually using reasonable and industry standard methods to collect email addresses. However, in their case, they are a large target for people to forge email addresses in forms. “Bob doesn’t like the president, but I’ll sign him up for this list so he can learn how things really are.” or “Joe doesn’t like the democrats so I’ll sign him up for their mailings just to piss him off.”

When you are confronted with an email campaign that upsets a large number of people there are a number of steps you should take.
Step 1: Gather information
This includes information internally about what actually happened with the campaign and information from the people who are complaining.
Externally: Get copies of the emails with full headers. If you’re working with people who do not want to reveal any details of the mail they received then you may not be able to fully investigate it, but if they do you will have everything you need right there. Figure out where their address came from (you do have good audit trails for all your email addresses, right?).
Internally: Talk to everyone who worked on that particular campaign. This includes the geek down in the IT department who manages the database. Figure out if anything internally went wrong and mail was sent to people it wasn’t intended for. I know of at least 2 cases where a SQL query was incorrectly set up and the unsubscribe list was mailed by accident.
Step 2: Identify the underlying problem
Look at all the available information and identify what happened. Was there a bad source of email addresses? Did someone submit addresses of spamtraps to a webform? Was there a technical problem? Again, talk to your people internally. In many companies I have noticed a tendency to try and troubleshoot problems like this at very high levels (VP or C-level executives) without involving the employees who probably know exactly what happened. This sometimes leads to mis-identifying the problem. If you can’t identify it, you can’t fix it.
Step 3: Identify the solution
Once you know what the problem was, you can work out a solution. Sometimes these are fairly simple, sometimes not so much. On the simple end you may have to implement some data hygiene. On the more complex end, you may need to change how data is handled completely.
Step 4: Inform the relevant parties of the solution
Make a statement about the problem, that you’ve identified it and that you’ve taken steps to fix it. How you do this is a little outside my area of expertise, although I have participated in crafting the message, rely on your PR folks on how to communicate this. In the Internet space, honesty is prized over spin, so do remember that.
Every company is going to have the occasional problem. In the email space, that tends to result in the company being labeled a spammer. Instead of being defensive about the label, use the accusation to drive internal change to stop your mail from being labeled spam by the recipients.

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