Who is John McCain and why is he spamming me?

So this morning I fired up my email and amongst the spam I received I found a plea from someone called John McCain asking me to please vote for him. His actual words were:

I humbly ask you to make the choice that will allow me to serve my country a little while longer by casting your vote to elect me as your next President of the United States.

I simply can’t believe that the people running his campaign have decided to spray his whining message everyone on the Internet in the hope that they might hit some US citizens who may be persuaded by his message. I’ve seen a number of tweets from people in Australia and France who have received this and noone seems to have signed up for any campaign messages from him.

The issue here is around cost. Unfortunately this is one problem with email, and the reason why spammers are so attracted to the medium. It’s actually cheaper to harass everyone you know that it is to filter out relevant recipients for your email. Granted, your conversion ratio will be abysmal; but if there’s no incremental cost of sending out the extra email, then why bother filtering it in the first place. Why would someone selling nfl jerseys mailshot me, for example, even need to check I’m a likely client (I hate sports!), if it bears no incremental cost to tell me about their products? I wonder if the solution to spam is really around charging people to send email.

Personally, I didn’t really have any issues with either Obama or McCain; but I now hope McCain doesn’t get elected .. I can’t bear the thought of filtering through all the additional spam I’d start receiving from the US.

6 comments

  1. Looks like a final act of desperation if you ask me! Its the old style throw enough s**t at the wall and hope that some if it will stick. If you ask me the whole pre election campaigning by both camps is a complete waste of millions and millions of dollars that could be spent on more worthy causes!

  2. I got the same email late last night and I’m a true blue Democrat who volunteers for Obama. I had to laugh at the unsubscribe website with the options they gave. There was not one option for me to say that I do not nor ever did support McCain, so I wrote that in.

    He’s pretty desperate for votes right now I’d say and if he thinks an email is going to do it this late in the game he and his campaign are really dreaming.

  3. Geez, one email from McCain is not that bad. Try getting 5 spam email’s from Barrack Obama and David Plouffe, since September 24. Spamming people does not help your cause, once I’d be fine with, 193 times over the course of a month is way too much. So Obama didn’t get a vote from me he just pissed me off.

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