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

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

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.

Read More

Fast and loose

Politicians often play fast and loose with permission and data. This can cause them all sorts of problems with email delivery at major ISPs. I really expect that politicians buy, sell, transfer, spindle, mutilate and fold data. If they can use it to further their goals, they will. And, many of the consumer protection and privacy laws don’t apply to political groups.
The news that Representative Bachman may have known that some of her mailing list was taken and used by others is a surprise even to me. I talked with a few ESP reps, though, and they told me that this was mostly par for the course and that they often have a lot of delivery and compliance issues with their political clients. Many have had to suspend or terminate political clients, and a couple people mentioned SBL listings.
This isn’t a problem with just one side of the political spectrum, it seems endemic in how the game is played.
 
 

Read More