One of the toughest jobs for spam auditors is when “one man’s spam is another man’ reading material”, and never is it more apparent than during election times in the US.
Today, Hillary Clinton’s campaign started used ‘Exact Target’ to send out her plea and solicitations.. Not really sure where they get their email lists for who to send to, but it is obvious that it isn’t ‘opted in’ in the more traditional manner, based on complaints coming in that it is spam.
# -- Received: from mail7223.hillaryclinton.mkt7822.com (HELO mail7223.hillaryclinton.mkt7822.com) (129.33.239.168) # -- Received: from mail7549.hillaryclinton.mkt8148.com (HELO mail7549.hillaryclinton.mkt8148.com) (129.33.240.222)
But aside from discussing another Hillary email controversy, and whether politicians should have to follow CAN-SPAM requirements, the funny this is that a person’ political persuasons affect how they judge the content.
If you are a Hillary supporter, you might be upset if you didn’t get her emails.
Just last week, we received false positive reports where a Republican email blast for Donald Trump, sent out for his solicitations, ended up getting caught in a customers email filter.
We can only assume they were a Trump supporter. But of course, it could have easily been the other way around. If they were a Democrat, would they have complained if Trump’s email landed in their email box? Or would they have complained if Hillary’s email was marked as spam?
This is why, even the best Spam Auditing team can never get it 100% right. As an email administrator, all you can do is aim for 99% and make sure you empower the end user to make the final choice. This is usually handled with a ‘This is Junk’ or ‘Allow Sender’ type of controls.
It would be really interesting, and probably more accurate that the polls, if someone got the data from the largest email providers.. (Gmail?) and asked them..
How many marked Hillary campaign emails as Spam? How many as Not Spam?
How many marked Trump campaign emails as Spam? How many as Not Spam?
Do you empower your customers to make their choice of politician (or any controversial subject) on their own using your email platforms? Oh, and of course it would be better if both parties when choosing the partner to do their email campaigns to make sure that the sender actually uses their branded domain.. In the above case, it would be easier for Hillary supporters to know that the can whitelist ‘@hillaryclinton.com’ instead of ‘@bounce.hillaryclinton.com’.
We leave it for someone else to figure out how they get your email address for their email campaigns.