In the last days of the longest and most expensive presidential campaign ever, both sides are using email aggressively.  And why not? Email is cheap, campaigns are desperate, and they are exempt from CAN-SPAM regulations.

That’s right. Political and religious speech are explicitly made exempt within CAN-SPAM’s regulations.  When this law was framed, the exemption allowed it to avoid significant First Amendment tests.

Subscribers Rule
Legal exemption or not, subscribers decide what is spam as far as internet service providers are concerned.  And though their complains don’t have legal weight because of the CAN-SPAM law’s exemption for political speech, they are causing some campaign communications to be blocked en masse by ISPs. (Campaigns are starting to change IP addresses to avoid such filtering.)

Obama Emails Liberally, Catches More Heat
ComputerWorld and The Denver Daily News report that ISPs have started to filter Obama emails as a result of subscriber complains. It appears his campaign has matched names of registered Democrats to email addresses provided by third-party vendors. In industry terms, they’ve performed an email append.

Early in the election, the Obama campaign had sloppy email registration processes.  One could register any email address and person name, which would be automatically subscribed to emails without any confirmation process. So, someone theoretically could take your email address and enter it through the Obama site, along with firstname = “Fat” and lastname = “Slob,” and the campaign would send you messages that began, “Dear Fat Slob …”

McCain Emails More Conservatively, But Still Draws Negative Opinions
ISPs report fewer complaints about the McCain campaign’s email strategy, and note that his team is sending a dramatically lower volume of email.

However, the Denialism blog complains about McCain’s opt-out mechanism, which requires you to affirm your support for McCain before you can leave:

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When is email definitely not spam?
When it’s relevant and people really want it.

Email service provider ExactTarget quotes me in their corporate blog today on the benefits of creating highly personalized email communications. Along with the “use benefits” I quantified for them, I’d also offer that personalizing communications often shifts the editorial voice to being more customer-focused.

In the end, communication isn’t technical; its personal. It inevitably conveys how we regard the person we’re addressing, and the values of the company or person sending the message.  If these personal aspects are removed from a message, then the communication becomes a notification.

Slydial is a free voice message service that directly connects you to someone else’s mobile voicemail. Their phone never rings, and you get to leave a message without actually speaking with them. (Wait for the legal angle; it’s coming.)

Their wonderfully written weasely website spells it right out. There are people you must phone: bosses, significant others, or your aunt for example. And while you might not want to talk to them at the moment, you still want the credit of calling. Now you can Slydial them.

Yep, it’s still in beta and already the product name is a verb.

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2008 has had a string of huge spam convictions. Sanford Wallace and crew gathered $230 million in fines, while “Spam King” Robert Soloway faces extended jail time.

Now Adam Vitale will receive 30 months in prison and $183,000 due in restitution to AOL for a week of spamming back in 2005. Yes, the wheels of justice grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.

Also, an FTC settlement requires Spear Systems and its executives to pay $29,000 in fines for falsely marketing supposed weight-loss supplements. This enforcement action is the first instance of FTC staff using the US Safe Web Act to share information with foreign partners.

CAN-SPAM’s requirements are minimal. There are lots of reasons for marketers to substantially exceed them. But just imagine explaining to one’s new cellmates that one is in prison for spamming. That can’t be popular.

Back in May, the FTC issued a modest set of clarified definitions and additional new CAN-SPAM rules.  Today, July 7th, 2008, those additional rules go in to effect.

If you’re a conscientious email marketer and already on the right side on the full body of federal CAN-SPAM rules, then there’s likely little more you’ll need to do.

However, if you’ve not been attentive to CAN-SPAM requirements, its time to tune in: recent court rulings have held senders of spam liable for large fines and imprisonment.  Besides, reputable marketers should routinely go beyond CAN-SPAM’s modest requirements.

Once you’ve read the federal CAN-SPAM legislation, you’ll see it does little to stop the sending of unsolicited messages. One might in fact call it the “Yes, you CAN spam” act.

Yet even if you can spam, there are good reasons not to. Recently, James B. Zagel of the U.S. District Court in Northern Illinois rulled in e360 v. Comcast that Internet service providers (ISPs) are not liable for mistakenly blocking even permission-based e-mail when it’s part of a good-faith effort to protect subscribers from spam.

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The Federal Trade Commission has issued new provisions under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. These are additional definitions and adjustments to rules, and do not significantly extend these anti-spam regulations for most marketers.

The new provisions address the following main themes:

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A U.S. District Judge in Los Angeles has ruled that “spam king” Sanford Wallace and his accomplice Walter Rines are liable to pay MySpace $230 million in damages. This is significant both for the verdict’s size, and because the spam happened entirely within MySpace rather than through traditional ISP based email.

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Colorado has passed new anti-spam legislation, which establishes violations of federal CAN-SPAM law as also being fraud under state law. It then extends the law to those who knowingly falsify routing of point-of-origin information, while establishing protections for plaintiffs, and a statutory penalty of $1,000 per email with a ceiling of $10 million. You can find details and a link to the legislation in the now-updated UsefulArts Guide to State SPAM Laws.

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Large scale spammer Robert Soloway, age 28, whose criminal trial was scheduled to start in a week, is facing a possible 26-year jail sentence after pleading guilty in Seattle on Friday to charges of fraud and tax evasion.

Soloway is set to be sentenced on June 20, 2008.

The indictment included an array of charges:

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