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.

Newsmax Media represents Herman Cain’s email list. This list was not created from his presidential campaign, but from other activities online where respondents doubled opted-in to receive information from Mr. Cain on his views and activities.
At no time are email addresses from the Cain list shared with third parties, advertisers or marketers. Marketers are allowed to place advertisements in the body of the content of emails sent to the Herman Cain list. Mr. Cain and Newsmax adhere to all industry best practices for email sending and marketing.

Looking back at my post, I commented that the list was being rented. When I was talking about list rental, I did not mean that the list was being given to other senders. What I was trying to say is that advertisers are submitting ads to Mr. Cain’s organization and paying him to mail those ads to the list for them.
As for the source of the addresses, the New Republic article had this to say about the source of the addresses.

After Cain dropped out, he donated his enlarged list to Cain Connections, a newly formed super PAC, which then gave it to his new media company. Federal election statutes bar candidates from using campaign resources for personal use, but by passing the e-mail list through his PAC, Cain kept things inbounds. The maneuver, says Matt Sanderson, an election-law expert at the Washington, D.C., firm Caplin & Drysdale, was a means “to indirectly do what you otherwise couldn’t.”Why is Herman Cain trying to cure your ED?

Without getting too much into a political discussion, I think it is extremely unlikely that people who opted in to receive mail from someone running for president expected to receive advertisements for mail enhancement drugs, miracle cures or get rich quick schemes.
An interesting factoid provided by Newsmax is that the Herman Cain list is double opt-in. That does mean that all the recipients are interested in and expecting to receive news from Mr. Cain. And I’m fine with including some advertising to support the mailings. I would be amazed, though, if all the advertisements were expected by the recipients. I did go ahead and sign up for the newsletter advertised on CainTv. It will be interesting to see if they’re still using double opt-in or not. If they are, their confirmation emails are not showing up very promptly.
EDIT: ThinkProgress looks at the marketer selling through Newsmax and other conservative outlets.
UPDATE 2/2: While Herman Cain may have used double opt-in during his presidential campaign, signups on caintv.com are not using any form of confirmation. They’re not even sending welcome messages. I’m not sure why Newsmax told me something that was so trivially falsifiable, but at least some portion on Mr. Cain’s list is not double opt-in.

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Confirmation is too hard…

One of the biggest arguments against confirmation is that it’s too hard and that there is too much drop off from subscribers. In other words, recipients don’t want to confirm because it’s too much work on their part.
I don’t actually think it’s too much work for recipients. In fact, when a sender has something the recipient wants then they will confirm.
A couple years ago I was troubleshooting a problem. One of my client’s customer was seeing a huge percentage of 550 errors and I was tasked with finding out what they were doing. The first step was identifying the source of the email addresses. Turns out the customer was a Facebook app developer and all the addresses (so he told me) were from users who had installed his apps on Facebook. I did my own tests and couldn’t install any applications without confirming my email address.
Every Facebook user that has installed an application has clicked on an email to confirm they can receive email at the address they supplied Facebook. There are over 1 billion users on Facebook.
Clicking a link isn’t too hard for people who want your content. I hear naysayers who talk about “too hard” and “too much drop off” but what they’re really saying is “what I’m doing isn’t compelling enough for users to go find the confirmation email.”
This isn’t to say everyone who has a high drop off of confirmations is sending poor content. There are some senders that have a lot of fake, poor or otherwise fraudulent addresses entered into their forms. In many cases this is the driving factor for them using COI: to stop people from using their email to harass third parties. Using COI in these cases is a matter of self protection. If they didn’t use COI, they’d have a lot of complaints, traps and delivery problems.
The next time you hear confirmation is too hard, remember that over 1 billion people, including grandparents and the technologically challenged, managed to click that link to confirm their Facebook account. Sure, they wanted what Facebook was offering, but that just tells us that if they want it bad enough they’ll figure out how to confirm.
HT: Spamresource

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I mentioned yesterday one of the major political blogs launched their mailing list yesterday. I pointed out a number of things they did that may cause problems. Today, I discovered another problem.
This particular blog has been around for a long time, probably close to 10 years. It allows anyone to join and create their own blogs and comment with registered users. As part of their new mailing list, they added everyone who has ever registered to their mailing list. They did not send a “we have a new list, want to join it?” email, they added every registered user to the list and said “you can opt out if you want.”
This is such a bad idea. My own account was used once, to make one comment, back in 2005. Yes, 2005. It’s been almost 5 years since I last logged into the site. Sure, I have email addresses that go back that far, but not everyone does. That list is going to be full of problems: dead addresses, spamtraps, duplicates, unengaged and uninterested.
Seriously, they’re adding people who’ve not logged into their site in 5 years to a mailing list. How can this NOT go horribly wrong?
My initial thought was this was going to blow up in a week. I’m now guessing they’ll start seeing delivery problems a lot sooner than that.

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Repurposing addresses

Multiple news sources are reporting that Herman Cain, republican presidential hopeful from 2012. Maddow on Herman Cain’s new business model. Apparently, his email address list is for rent by just about anyone, including companies selling cures for erectile dysfunction.

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