Show HN: I signed up for every presidential candidate's email list

Show HN: I signed up for every presidential candidate's email list(twitter.com)

11 points by DerekH 10 years ago | 5 comments

DerekH 10 years ago |

Hey everyone,

I signed up for every presidential candidate's email list to see what happens. I hooked up a Gmail account to this Twitter handle, uploading all incoming emails to Dropbox.

Also, I used an email address variation that I can identify with every candidate. My plan is to watch how my email address gets bounced around to different parts of their campaigns. If anything, by the end of the election cycle, I'll have some interesting data points to play around with.

tjr 10 years ago | |

Another fun experiment would be to see how hard it is to unsubscribe.

I have found that some candidates do in fact unsubscribe you from the mailing list you are on... only to subscribe you to a different mailing list that they operate.

caffeinewriter 10 years ago | |

Just out of curiosity, why don't the Bernie emails tag @SenSanders?

DerekH 10 years ago | | |

Originally, I finished the first version of the code and forgot a few of them (went to bed). I forgot to tag Bernie, Bobby Jindal, Huckabee, and Rand Paul.

I fixed it last night. Also, for the life of me, I can't sign up for Ben Carson's email list anywhere. I keep getting errors from https://api.hubapi.com/emailvalidation. Valid email addresses throw an error as well.

jimkri 10 years ago |

This is very interesting, and such a great idea. Doing a textual analysis of all the emails would be really interesting. So far I have looked through almost all of the emails and its amazing how they word everything.

It seems that they love using the word "Friend". They also love using the word, "Chip" when they as for donations. Also marco robio is going with asking the citizens for a "Favor" and to donate $7 or more.

Pretty interesting stuff.