Spam filtering is apolitical

It’s time once again for news organizations to pay attention to spam filters. This happens sometimes. Intrepid news organizations breathlessly report on how a particular ISP is blocking mail from a certain political figure our organization. I’ve written about political and activist lists being blocked or filtered before. Some of these posts are from the very early days of the blog even.
electionemail
In 2007, AOL came under fire when their filters were blocking mail from Truthout.org. Truthout’s response was to yell, loudly, this was censorship and unfair. I talked about it in two blog posts: They’re not blocking you because they hate you and It really can be your email.
The reality is mail wasn’t blocked because AOL didn’t like Truthout or what they stood for. In fact, the folks I knew at the postmaster desk who handled blocking issues were more likely to support Truthout than try and censor them. But, the reality was that truthout.org was sending bad mail and it wasn’t wanted and so it got filtered. Don’t believe me? Carl Hutzler ran the AOL postmaster team and blogged about it at the time. His blog is gone, but archive.org has the full text.

In all of my years at AOL, I can tell you that AOL never intentionally blocked an organization for their political views. I would not have allowed it. But we did block some of these political groups along the way…I remember AOL automatically blocked the DNC and RNC repeatedly in election years for bad complaint rates and high bounce rates. Eventually these groups even told us that they bought “lists of likely voters” and emailed them. And as such, complaint rates and bounces were off the charts. And I remember having blocking issues with Moveon.org as well, at least once. These were not issues with the organization and what they stood for. The issues were due to mailing practices and the resulting poor statistics that the organizations had in our spam control systems.

In 2011 the domain OccupyWallSt.org was blocked by Yahoo. I talked about this in my post Censorship, Email and Politics. The interesting bit about this situation was that the mail was being blocked on the outbound. I don’t talk much about outbound filtering but all the major ISPs filter outgoing mail. It takes some fairly bad behavior to get blocked, but it can happen.
Some of the blocks are predictable. A few years ago the Obama / Biden presidential campaign offered to send an email to a recipient on behalf of donors. I can think of no better way to annoy recipients than this scheme. This doesn’t seem to have come to pass.
Political organizations think they’re exempt from rules and laws. In some cases they are. Political email is exempt from CAN SPAM for instance. That doesn’t mean they are exempt from filtering processes. Political mailers can send mail so badly it is blocked for looking like spam. This is getting worse now that many of the webmail provider filters are built with machine learning. When a human was in the loop (Politics and Delivery) there was opportunity for overriding decisions. Now, most filters are automatic and many ISPs either can’t or won’t override the filters.
On top of the differences in laws, politics is contentious. Many people believe that dirty tricks are OK in politics. This includes adding bad addresses into an opponent’s list. Forms are left open and do minimal data checking. There is no confirmation, or sometimes even no welcome message to let recipients know their address has been added. I’ve mentioned this to various political groups in the past, usually when they come to me complaining about poor delivery and high complaint rates. For them, any address is valuable and as they make money by the address they don’t care if the address belongs to the person who added to to their form.
Filters look at how wanted mail is. They don’t really care whether a mail is legal or not. They just look at how the users are reacting to and interacting with an email. For various reasons political email can look like spam. Political senders have more control over deliverability than they think. All it requires is they hink about deliverability as part of their overall strategy.

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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.

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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.
 
 

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Politics and Delivery

Last week I posted some deliverability advice for the DNC based on their acquisition of President Obama’s 2012 campaign database. Paul asked a question on that post that I think is worth some attention.

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