As if the election season didn't wear on everyone's nerves enough between all of the empty promises, rhetoric, and smear campaigns, now we have to deal with candidate "spam" on top of everything else.

Why is spam in quotes?

As we mentioned in the September version of our Threat Report and Forecast (download it here), because of how the CAN-SPAM law is written, it is targeted towards what is defined as "commercial" email messages.  Political campaign ads that are not attempting to sell anything do not fall into this category.  Hence, politicians can send out as much politically motivated email as they want without penalty.

...and boy have they....

From our observations, Obama has taken the clear technological lead as it relates to using email as a medium to reach out to potential voters.  According to our statistics, we are processing about 20,000 messages per day on behalf of the barackobama.com domain, and that doesn't account for the tens or hundreds of other domains that are also likely registered on behalf of the Obama campaign.  We are only tracking barackobama.com.  On the flip side, the number of messages that we are seeing for johnmccain.com is quite small (a couple hundred per day) in comparison.

Unfortunately, the people running Obama's email campaign and/or web site have some issues to resolve with respect to how their emails are being sent to potential voters.  For starters, there is no confirmed consent when an email address is signed up to receive Obama updates.  So, nothing stops me from going to the barackobama.com web site and signing up some of my John McCain supporting friends from receiving daily updates on Barack Obama (to be fair, the John McCain web site has this same problem!) as he blazes the campaign trail.  Yes, there is a link to unsubscribe from these messages at the bottom of the email, but many users do not believe that these links work, especially in instances where they never asked to receive the mail in the first place.  They think "If I didn't ask to receive this, why would I believe they would actually stop if I ask them to?"  Note that I am not making any claims as to whether or not their particular unsubscribe mechanisms work, rather the mindset of a person who received an email they didn't ask for.

The Obama folks also seem to have a problem targeting their emails to the proper audience.  This has caused people receiving their emails to report them as spam to their service providers which has resulted in a number of providers starting to block their emails unless the user has added the sender to their personal allow list. 

I'll illustrate with my own example.

A few weeks ago I signed up a throwaway account at a free webmail provider to sign up for emails from Obama off of his web site.  The emails starting flooding in...like this one:



This message was sent by illinois@barackobama.com asking me to attend an event in Wisconsin (Ahem, I live in Colorado).  This email is similar to about 8-10 that I receive daily from the Obama campaign telling me about events in New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, New Mexico....and on and on. 

This is where we get into the argument that I am in very frequently with bulk emailers with respect to "content vs. consent".  Many bulk emailers will argue that "You signed up on the site, so they can email you."  Although I partially agree with that, many users take a different tact, one of relevance.  As a user of email, although I signed up to receive email from barackobama.com, I also gave them my zip code during that sign up process.  As such, they should be able to target which messages I receive and which ones I do not.  I don't care about Obama rallies in Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, or any of the other states that aren't either where I live or within some relatively close proximity.  To most people these types of emails are considered junk.  The content isn't relevant to them.  Although we consented to receive emails from Obama, there is a level of expectation that based on the fact that you know where I live, you will send me content that I have a chance of caring about.  This sort of targeting is not difficult to do.

Disclaimer: Do not consider this post as an endorsement or lack thereof for either candidate.  This is simply data that I have collected based on my own personal experiences.