Also posted at TechPresident

If you’re on Rudy Giuliani’s email list, be warned that you’re likely in it for the long haul.  If you click on the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of any of Giuliani’s emails, you’re brought to JoinRudy2008.com, his campaign’s website.  There appears to be no other way to opt-out of Rudy’s emails, save for replying to the emails with removal requests.  Aside from annoying, there is the chance that Giuliani’s emails are illegal under the CAN-SPAM Act, the federal law regulating unsolicited email communications.  Let’s take a look at the letter of the law.

According to good old Wikipedia, commercial emails must meet several criteria to be compliant, including making options available for unsubscribing:

Unsubscribe Compliance:

> A visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism is present in all emails.

> Consumer opt-out requests are honored within 10 days.

> Opt-out lists also known as suppression lists are only used for compliance purposes.

At first blush, Giuliani is in clear violation for not having an “operable unsubscribe mechanism” in his emails.  However, the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that enforces CAN-SPAM, provides for a few more options for unsubscribe compliance,:, including using a Reply-to email address to collect unsubscribe requests. You must provide a return email address or another Internet-based
response mechanism that allows a recipient to ask you not to send
future email messages to that email address, and you must honor the requests. You may create a “menu” of choices to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to end any commercial messages from the sender.

Unfortunately, because Giulaini’s emails are not explicitly offering a commercial service, his campaign is likely exempt from CAN-SPAM compliance as a political organization.  (Religious organizations and “national security” messages are also exempt.)  But just because his campaign doesn’t explicitly violate the law, it is still a bad practice to not give email subscribers a way out.

While loyal Rudy supporters are likely happy to receive Rudy’s emails for all of eternity, people who subscribed to the list to learn about the candidate or to otherwise observe do not have a direct way to unsubscribe.

This is something that the Giuliani campaign needs to fix by the next time it sends out an email, and it’s something the other campaigns should test so as to not fall into the same trap as Rudy.

Update: I posted this in the comments of my post on TechPresident

A couple of things.

I think a little bit more context is necessary – I apologize for not providing more in the initial post.

First, the person who first discovered this problem has repeatedly tried to unsubscribe from Giuliani’s emails without success – both through that unsubscribe link, by replying to the emails, and by calling the offices – to no avail. She is still on the list.

Second, just because you see a Lyris link doesn’t mean that you’re going to where you’re supposed to go. All email marketing applications – from lyrics to Convio to Constant Contact – offer clickthrough tracking for links in emails. The links are tracked by changing all of the URLs you make in a message to first hit a page set up by the company that tracks how many hits the page has, and then forwards you on to the actual page.

So even though it looks like a normal link an email, it’s actually just tracking the clicks without doing what it’s supposed to do. You can check this out with any of the candidates – all links on Joe Biden’s emails first go to a Get Active page (http://ga3.org…, etc.), for example, before forwarding on to Biden’s website.

I think Colin’s correct that this is a problem with the email template that has to be corrected, and not a malicious plot by the Giuliani campaign to trap email recipients forever. It is disconcerting that it is not a more obvious process to get out of the email list.