Antispam vendors have blocked some e-mail from the campaign of Democratic Presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) because customers have complained about receiving irrelevant messages, an executive at MX Logic Inc. said Thursday.
For several weeks, said Sam Masiello , vice president of information security at Colorado-based MX Logic, his company has been receiving complaints from customers
about messages from the Obama presidential campaign. MX Logic started blocking many of those messages "relatively recently,"
said Masiello, who declined to be more specific about the timing.
Slideshow: 8 ways technology has shaped the '08 elections
Other antispam and messaging services have taken similar steps, Masiello said. He would not name the other vendors, but said
that "based on conversations with our peers, they've had to take the same stance."
The complaints stemmed from messages that concerned rallies and other political events scheduled in other states, said Masiello.
"From the standpoint of the users' perspectives, I can see why some messages are considered spam," he said. "The messages
are not really relevant to the individual receiving them. You may live in Colorado, but you may be receiving mail about rallies
in Virginia or rallies in Ohio."
People who sign up to receive messages from the Obama campaign provide their e-mail address and their zip code. The latter,
said Masiello, should be enough for the campaign to better target recipients.
Masiello acknowledged that users must opt in to receive messages from the Obama campaign. "But when you look at it from a
users' perspective, they want content that's relevant to them," he said.
MX Logic is not blocking all e-mail from Obama's campaign, nor is it blocking any from the campaign of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz) . "We're not blocking mail from the info@barackobama.com address," Masiello said. "Users haven't been complaining about that
mail. We're getting lots more about the messages from the individual state addresses."
Few if any complaints have come in about messages from McCain's campaign, perhaps because the McCain volume through MX Logic
is so small. Masiello said that MX Logic handles approximately 20,000 messages daily from Obama, but just a few hundred from
McCain, the Republican nominee.
For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright Computerworld, Inc.
