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.
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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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Michele Bachmann Announces She's Done

U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota) announced today that she’s not going to seek re-election in 2014.
Last time around, the race between her and Minnesota businessman Jim Graves was very close. Mr. Graves lost by a very narrow margin. Graves had already announced his intention to take on Ms. Bachmann again next year. As the news came out on Bachmann’s decision, both camps made it clear that they think their person would have won the rematch. Just yesterday, Minnesota Public Radio explained that Graves seemed to be facing “an uphill battle vs. Bachmann.” At the same time, recent polling by the Graves campaign showed him slightly ahead of Bachmann. The race certainly would have been very close, but it was looking to be a scenario much like last time around, which, at the end of the day, Ms. Bachmann did end up winning.
So if she’s got at least a fair shake at winning, why wouldn’t she take it all the way? Well, that’s what brings us to why I’m writing about this here. It seems that Bachmann’s failed 2012 presidential campaign was accused of stealing the email list of Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators (NICHE) back in 2011. In a bit of an attempt to re-write history, they later came to an after-the-fact settlement to label the action a “rental” and NICHE received a $2,000 payment from the Bachmann campaign.
And that’s just one of multiple ethics issues Minnesota’s face of the Tea Party is facing. In March, her attorney confirmed that Bachmann is under investigation by the Office of Congressional Ethics for alleged misuse of campaign funds. One of her own 2012 presidential campaign staffers, Peter Waldron, filed a complaint that Ms. Bachmann’s campaign improperly used leadership PAC funds to pay campaign staff. There were further allegations regarding payment of staffers and attempting to require exiting staffers to sign non-disclosure agreements prohibiting them from talking to police or attorneys. And the FBI is now said to be involved.
I’ve consulted for multiple email service providers who have told me how challenging it can be to work with political senders. At least one ESP prohibits this kind of mail outright, out of frustration with candidates regularly playing fast and loose with permission. PACs, parties, candidates and other groups seem to buy, sell or trade lists constantly, and as a result, spam complaints and blocking would often follow. Thus, it doesn’t surprise me to see Ms. Bachmann’s campaign engaging in something email list-related that they probably thought was just common usage, when the rest of us in the email community would find that use unwelcome and unethical. (And it’s not just her party guilty of this kind of thing.)

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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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More on Newsmax and spam to political lists

Things are getting stranger and stranger with Newsmax and the politicians they’re managing lists for.  Earlier this week, recipients on Scott Brown’s list received emails with the subject line “5 Signs You’ll Get Alzheimer’s Disease.” The advertisement was for products and information from Dr. Blaylock, a contributor to Newsmax Health. Scott Brown told the political reporter at WMUR in New Hampshire that he did not authorize this email was cutting ties with Newsmax
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.
It seems, though, that may not be the whole truth. After I received the message from Newsmax, I signed up on caintv.com to see if they really were using double opt-in. While it is very possible that Mr. Cain was using double opt-in during the campaign, he isn’t any longer. I started receiving emails immediately, with neither a welcome message or a confirmation message.
In the case of Scott Brown’s list, the advertisement wasn’t from an outside advertiser, the advertisement was for a Newsmax columnist. And the ad wasn’t in the body of a message to supporters, it was the message to supporters. Mr. Brown has this to say about his likeness and mailing list being used by Newsmax.

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