Bad data drives delivery problems

It’s a wild election season here in the US. In the past few presidential elections, email has played a bigger and bigger role in messaging and fundraising. President Obama’s campaign used email effectively, but sent  huge volumes. In fact, the volume was so heavy, it led to a joke on the Daily Show.

(Video: email question at the 5:56 mark)
Jon Stewart: “We have been talking here for 12 – 14 minutes. I am curious. How many emails, in that time, do you think your campaign has sent me?”
President Obama: “It depends on whether you’ve maxed out!” Data Driven Email

This year there is a stark difference in how the candidates are using email. Return Path has different blog posts about the success of the Clinton, Sanders and Trump email campaigns which let’s you play around with the data they’ve collected from the different campaigns.

Recently Donald Trump’s campaign has been in the news for different email related issues. He sent his first fundraising email on June 21, 2016. But 60% of those emails went to spam. Some have speculated that the spam was due to a new domain.
That spam rate, however, may not be simply due to using a brand new domain. Recent reports are that email went out to foreign nationals in Iceland, Scotland, Britain, including some government officials. Yes, Donald Trump’s campaign is spamming foreign government officials on their government addresses asking for donations.
I’ve been around the email industry long enough to know that campaigns, special interest groups and elected officials share constituent and supporter data freely. There isn’t really ever anything like informed opt-in when it comes to politics, PACs or political groups. Anything citizens do that lands an email address in the hands of a political group results in that address being shared.

Sign a petition? Address gets shared.

Make a donation? Address gets shared.

Sign up to volunteer? Address gets shared.

Contact an elected official? Address gets shared.

I don’t really expect the campaigns to do only opt-in mail. I do expect campaigns to do mostly opt-in with a side of strict hygiene and well crafted messages that get good delivery. But opt-in isn’t in their nature. Still, this is noteworthy in that the mail went to people that should never appear on a US political list.
With this new information, I’m much less inclined to blame his brand new domain for a 60% email rate. I think it’s much more likely that the problem is the data. Who knows where the campaign got the address list, but it certainly doesn’t seem like it was even political style opt-in.
This is yet another example of how data quality and source directly affects deliverability results. Sure, part of the problem may be the domain wasn’t properly warmed up. But it’s much more likely that the problem was the fact that the delivery problems were the result of using bad data.
 
 
 

Bounce handling is hard
Spam filtering is apolitical

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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:

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Memories of Spam in May

This morning on Facebook a friend posted a picture saying that 15 years ago was the very first anti-spam conference (Spamcon*). All we have are some blurry scans of pictures and coffee mugs.
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That 550 sign belonged to the bar where the night out was held. It got bought by K & P and lived in their garden until it rotted away a few years ago. So many folks who are still active in the space, and so many folks who’ve moved on. Names I’d forgotten, faces I haven’t.
Many of those folks are still working in email. Some on the sending side, some on the tools and vendor side, some on the ISP side, some on the consulting side.  That conference was one of the very first times people publicly gathered to talk about spam. There were other occasions, but most were invite only with hand picked representatives of specific companies.
At that first Spamcon I was freshly laid off from MAPS (now Trend Micro). I was considering what next. The thing is, I really liked the work I was doing. MAPS had me leading a team to provide abuse desk as an outsourced service. We had a very large network provider as a customer and we were handling all the mail that came into abuse@ there. It was a challenge, I was creating processes and documenting policy, trying to do more with less and managing my first team ever.
Much of what I do now, here, grew out of that position. It was clear even then there was a need for someone who could help navigate the challenges of email.
In the same thread another person posted pictures from a social night in DC during the FTC Spam Forum. More folks, some I have lost touch with and some who are still friends and colleagues.
We were so young. All of us.
This is yet another form of community that email created. Some of it was built over email, but a lot of it happened on USENET and IRC and local meetups. There were so many ways we built community using plain text and dialup. The technology has changed, and that community from a dozen years ago has changed but it’s still all the same deep down inside.
SpamconMugs
 
(* If, at any point, you see me type Spamconk instead of Spamcon please blame autocorrect. It’s being difficult and even tries to correct it when I go back and edit sentences.)

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Newsmax contacted me after I posted about unexpected email to the Herman Cain mailing list. They wanted to make it clear to me that their mailings were all double opt-in and that they adhered to all best practices. They also said that select advertisers were allowed to put ads in the body of messages from the politician to their supporters.
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