If politicians really think they can get away with being exempt from best practices, let them try. With consumer perceptions of spam the way they are, ISP’s will be filtering out the IP in no time. Daily donation requests in my inbox from the DNC? Where’s that spam button…

The flip side, of course, is the nature of this particular beast. If you want to talk “relevance” –what’s more relevant than a message from your president about the potential use of your tax dollars or a new law that could directly affect you? Maybe the complaint rate won’t be so high after all.

My problem isn’t with the political campaigns as much as it is those in our industry that have not only given the bad email behavior of their choice of candidate a pass, but held it up as an example of what can be learned – and not the bad things that can be learned.

Then, when a company like Toys “R” US applies the very same lauded tactics, they do harm to their brand and are taken to task by the same pundits for emulating the same behaivor that those pundits promoted in article after article about what could be learned from the political campaigns.

Seriously, is it that hard for people in the email marketing space to take an objective view of email marketing and apply the standards that we’ve worked very hard to establish over the years equally?