Political Spam

At Adventures in Email Marketing, there is a post up this morning about political spam. It seems Anna discovered that providing her email address on her voter registration card not only results in political groups sending her email to that address, but also that political email does not have to follow the rules of CAN SPAM. The article ends with a few questions and makes some suggestions.

In general, why do politicians get such lax rules? Did the crafters of CAN-SPAM actually thing that candidates would (or could) ethically deal with this? The examples in my inbox show something different.

The flip answer is that the drafters of CAN SPAM are the political candidates and exempted themselves from the law because they did not want to have to follow it.
The less flip answer is that regulating political speech has less legal precedent than regulating commercial speech. Including non-commercial email in CAN SPAM would open the law up to a Constitutional challenge. By not including anything other than commercial speech, which the Supreme Court has ruled can be regulated by the government, there is much less chance that the law will be overturned as unconstitutional. In the 2005 final rule document, the FTC addresses the constitutionality of the law and provides references to case law supporting the role of government to regulate commercial speech (2005 Final rule, p 57 – 64 (link to PDF)).
There have been other reports of political spam this season. Ron Paul supporters used open proxies in China to send spam pushing their candidate. Campaigns of other major candidates have open signups on their web sites, allowing anyone to forge any email address into the form. Political advocacy groups have had similar problems in the past with not verifying subscriptions and therefore generating lots of complaints because the recipient never actually signed up for the mail.
I do have clients who send political mail. What I tell them is that the bar is set so low on CAN SPAM that there is no reason they should not comply with the law even though it does not apply to them. Allowing people to unsubscribe? Providing a physical postal address? Not forging headers? Meeting these conditions is trivial for any legitimate candidate and gives the recipients that warm fuzzy feeling that the candidate is acting in good faith.

Disposable or Temporary Addresses
Hard drive failure

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Social network sends spam

Yesterday we talked about social networks that harvest the address books of registered  users and send mail to all those addresses on behalf of their registered user. In the specific case, the registered user did not know that the network was going to send that mail and subsequently apologized to everyone.
That is not the only way social networks collect addresses. After I posted that, Steve mentioned to me that he had been receiving invitations from a different social network. In that case, the sender was unknown to Steve. It was random mail from a random person claiming that they knew each other and should network on this new website site.  After some investigation, Steve discovered that the person making the invitation was the founder of the website in question and there was no previous connection between them.
The founder of the social networking site was harvesting email addresses and sending out spam inviting people he did not know to join his site.
Social networking is making huge use of email. Many of my new clients are social networking sites having problems delivering mail. Like with most things, there are some good guys who really do respect their users and their privacy and personal information. There are also bad guys who will do anything they can to grow a site, including appropriating their users information and the information of all their users correspondents.
It is relatively early in the social networking product cycle. It remains to be seen how much of an impact the spammers and sloppier end will have. If too much spam gets through, the spam filters and ISPs will adapt and social networks will have to focus more on respecting users and potential users in order for their mail to get delivered.

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That's spammer speak

I’ve been hearing stories from other deliverability consultants and some ISP reps about what people are telling them. Some of them are jaw dropping examples of senders who are indistinguishable from spammers. Some of them are just examples of sender ignorance.
“We’re blocked at ISP-A, so we’re just going to stop mailing all our recipients at ISP-A.” Pure spammer speak. The speaker sees no value in any individual recipient, so instead of actually figuring out what about their mail is causing problems, they are going to drop 30% of their list. We talk a lot on this blog about relevancy and user experience. If a sender does not care about their email enough to invest a small amount of time into fixing a problem, then why should recipients care about the mail they are sending?
A better solution then just throwing away 30% of a list is to determine the underlying reasons for  delivery issues, and actually make adjustments to  address collection processes and  user experience. Build a sustainable, long term email marketing program that builds a loyal customer base.
“We have a new system to unsubscribe people immediately, but are concerned about implementing it due to database shrink.” First off, the law says that senders must stop mailing people that ask. Secondly, if people do not want email, they are not going to be an overall asset. They are likely to never purchase from the email, and they are very likely to hit the ‘this is spam’ button and lower the overall delivery rate of a list.
Let people unsubscribe. Users who do not want email from a sender are cruft. They lower the ROI for a list, they lower aggregate performance. Senders should not want unwilling or unhappy recipients on their list.
“We found out a lot of our addresses are at non-existent domains, so we want to correct the typos.” “Correcting” email addresses is an exercise in trying to read recipients minds. I seems intuitive that someone who typed yahooooo.com meant yahoo.com, or that hotmial.com meant hotmail.com, but there is no way to know for sure. There is also the possibility that the user is deliberately mistyping addresses to avoid getting mail from the sender. It could be that the user who mistyped their domain also mistyped their username. In any case, “fixing” the domain could result in a sender sending spam.
Data hygiene is critical, and any sender should be monitoring and checking the information input into their subscription forms. There are even services which offer real time monitoring of the data that is being entered into webforms. Once the data is in the database, though, senders should not arbitrarily change it.

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