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.

The erectile-dysfunction ad is one of more than 50 similar pitches for miracle cures and easy-money tricks that Cain has passed along to his e-mail followers over the past two years. While he has been particularly unabashed in his embrace of the practice, he is not the only past presidential candidate hawking sketchy products.Ben Adler, The New Republic

Of course, politicians of all stripes sell, share and barter access to their donor and subscriber lists. The news here is that they’re not just selling access to other politicians but they’re also selling them to marketers.

Where did you get my address?
Does email have a guarantee of delivery?

Related Posts

Payday loan mail

Mickey has a great story of what happened when he gave a lead gen company his email address. Over 200 emails in 2 weeks from companies that seem unrelated to the signup company.
It’s this behavior by PayDay senders that causes their mail to be filtered and has caused many, many ESPs just to prohibit that kind of mail on their systems. It’s very much the ugly underbelly of email marketing.

Read More

McCain Campaign Spamming

As I mentioned in my post on spam from the Obama campaign, there have been reports of spam coming from the McCain campaign. However, the McCain campaign does not seem to be sending the volume of mail that the Obama campaign is, and so they are not as visible.
A recent post over at Denialism Blog shows that the McCain campaign has some of the same problems as the Obama campaign. Chris talks about the unsubscribe options he is presented when trying to stop the spam he is receiving. He suggests the campaign adds another option:

Read More

Can someone explain to me…

What this disclaimer means?

You are receiving this email because you have a customer relationship or have opted-in to an email list managed by the Emailing Entity listed below. This email was not sent to you by the company or website identified in the offer above, for which we have a separate business relationship. We have represented to such company or website that we have the affirmative right to email you with an offer on their behalf.

Read More