The Donald Trump campaign doesn’t seem to be learning its lesson. As I posted to Quora yesterday:
I recently wrote a two-part article on Trump SPAM and posted them to the Daily Kos ( Did Donald Trump Raise $2 million from SPAM? , Trump Campaign SPAM Complaints Continue to Proliferate on Twitter ). Here are the facts:
- There are a lot of users taking to Twitter to complain about receiving Trump campaign e-mails without ever having signed up for his list.
- Shortly after his “first fundraising e-mail”, Alexa reported that ~20% of visits to the Trump2016 fundraising website were to the “unsubscribe” subdomain.
- Even with recent publicity, including allegations of a “tremendously high” SPAM complaint rate ( Trump Camp Still Not Asking for Donations in Emails ), there continue to be new reports of Trump campaign SPAM on Twitter.
- I reached out to e-mail delivery specialists Return Path on Twitter for a comment. Their reply (twitter.com/... ): “Based on the data, we surmise that Trump is likely buying lists, and he has a high spam complaint rate”.
I think a fair question to ask would be whether the Trump campaign is knowingly sending SPAM. However, the data supports the SPAM allegations being leveled at the 2016 Donald Trump presidential campaign.
Conservative media is up in arms about Gmail filtering Trump campaign messages to SPAM. Look at the closely matched timestamps on the Tweets below (from the last hour), and see if you can figure out why Google may think that the Donald Trump campaign is sending SPAM:
Here’s a hint from my first article on the topic:
In April 2016, the Donald Trump presidential campaign was sued by two people for allegedly sending unsolicited text messages. Unlike commercial SPAM e-mail, political SPAM e-mail is protected by the First Amendment. However, e-mail service providers could act to protect their users by filtering messages from known senders of SPAM to a SPAM folder.
The number of Twitter complaints associated with each blast appears to be dwindling. Maybe Team Trump is at least making some effort to perform proper list hygiene and clean up its list...