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.

Related Posts

Michele Bachmann Announces She's Done

U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota) announced today that she’s not going to seek re-election in 2014.
Last time around, the race between her and Minnesota businessman Jim Graves was very close. Mr. Graves lost by a very narrow margin. Graves had already announced his intention to take on Ms. Bachmann again next year. As the news came out on Bachmann’s decision, both camps made it clear that they think their person would have won the rematch. Just yesterday, Minnesota Public Radio explained that Graves seemed to be facing “an uphill battle vs. Bachmann.” At the same time, recent polling by the Graves campaign showed him slightly ahead of Bachmann. The race certainly would have been very close, but it was looking to be a scenario much like last time around, which, at the end of the day, Ms. Bachmann did end up winning.
So if she’s got at least a fair shake at winning, why wouldn’t she take it all the way? Well, that’s what brings us to why I’m writing about this here. It seems that Bachmann’s failed 2012 presidential campaign was accused of stealing the email list of Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators (NICHE) back in 2011. In a bit of an attempt to re-write history, they later came to an after-the-fact settlement to label the action a “rental” and NICHE received a $2,000 payment from the Bachmann campaign.
And that’s just one of multiple ethics issues Minnesota’s face of the Tea Party is facing. In March, her attorney confirmed that Bachmann is under investigation by the Office of Congressional Ethics for alleged misuse of campaign funds. One of her own 2012 presidential campaign staffers, Peter Waldron, filed a complaint that Ms. Bachmann’s campaign improperly used leadership PAC funds to pay campaign staff. There were further allegations regarding payment of staffers and attempting to require exiting staffers to sign non-disclosure agreements prohibiting them from talking to police or attorneys. And the FBI is now said to be involved.
I’ve consulted for multiple email service providers who have told me how challenging it can be to work with political senders. At least one ESP prohibits this kind of mail outright, out of frustration with candidates regularly playing fast and loose with permission. PACs, parties, candidates and other groups seem to buy, sell or trade lists constantly, and as a result, spam complaints and blocking would often follow. Thus, it doesn’t surprise me to see Ms. Bachmann’s campaign engaging in something email list-related that they probably thought was just common usage, when the rest of us in the email community would find that use unwelcome and unethical. (And it’s not just her party guilty of this kind of thing.)

Read More

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

Read More

The perils of politics

I’ve talked a little bit about political and activist mail in the past. In general, I believe political mailers tend to be aggressive in their address collection techniques and sloppy in acquiring permission.
For the most part, politicians can get away with aggressive email marketing in a way that commercial emailers can’t always. The laws for commercial email don’t really apply to political emails. Politicians and activists don’t have to comply with CAN SPAM. They don’t even have to stop mailing if you opt-out. They don’t have to identify themselves the way commercial emailers do. They trade, sell, barter and borrow voter data, including email addresses.
This doesn’t mean the politicians don’t get blocked. They most certainly do suffer delivery consequences to their behaviour.
Well, today I saw another article talking about the pitfalls of political mailings. According to US News, a number of people who are unlikely to be Republican supporters were reporting that they were spammed by the Romney campaign.
The Romney campaign says it wasn’t them, and that they are only sending mail to people who signed up to receive it. This is possible, the article at US News says that the signups came from an IP address that is part of the Tor network. What is Tor? Tor is a way to hide your location on the internet. Ever watch a crime show and see the master geek track a bad guy all over the world by IP address? That’s basically what Tor does.
It’s very possible someone did find a list of email addresses of people guaranteed to be angry about getting mail from the Romney campaign. It’s very possible they used Tor nodes to submit those addresses the campaign lists. It’s been known to happen, and it’s not like this election is getting any less contentious as we get closer to November.
Forged subscriptions are a problem for every activist and political mailing list. But most of them don’t take any steps to protect themselves from maliciousness. Welcome emails, confirmation emails, audit trails, monitoring can help minimize the chance of subscribing a lot of people who don’t want that mail. Most political and activist groups won’t take that step, though. They’d rather increase lists by any means necessary without adding any controls on making sure those addresses are valid.
The irony is that the first thing activists blame when they do have email delivery problems is their political opponents forging addresses into their list. But they still push back against actually implementing controls and protections against the practice.
As with many things, politicians want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the extra volume that comes from indiscriminate signups, but don’t think that should cause them any problems. It doesn’t work that way in the real world, though.

Read More