Dominic Raab and 38 Degrees

[ewx]

Tory MP tells constituents: “Don’t email me… it’s becoming a real nuisance”

I had a look at 38degrees and they're doing a bit more than “publishing his email address”, in fact one thing I don’t see there is an MPs email address. Rather they have a web form that pre-fills an email message to your MP (looked up by postcode) and sends it.

It looks like this:

The only things I entered were the email address and false name, and my postcode. Everything else is filled in by the website. I didn’t press the Send button l-)

It seems suspiciously like “push a button to spam your MP” to me and as such I can see why he’s pissed off. Perhaps they should instead send him a daily email saying how many people agreed with them (and invite anyone sufficiently motivated to say more than the boilerplate to contact him separately).

Would anyone care to argue that this sort of thing isn’t spam?

Comments

[naath.livejournal.com]

I think it's Not Spam because MPs publish their email addresses as one of the means people are *meant to contact them* about their opinions on parliamentary stuff.

If people are simply sending this boilerplate (and not, say, replacing it with PeN15 P1l55555 spam; and unfortunately there are numerous ways actual spammers can find MP's email addresses) then I think they are legitimately contacting their MP with concerns about parliamentary business; although they are doing so in a rather lazy way.

I agree though that it would be better for 38degrees to aggregate this information for MPs if people are in general too lazy to write their own text.

I don't think spam is "any email I don't want" I think it has to be narrower than that. More like "any email that isn't relevant to the purpose for which I told you this address" - my boss may not LIKE it if I email him to say "sorry I'm sick, will be off for a month" or "sorry, the computer has exploded" but these things are nevertheless legitimate work-related concerns.

[fanf]

Shortly after the election Julian Huppert received something like 2200 messages from 38degrees in the space of a few hours. They were urging him to support electoral reform which was a completely wasted lobbying effort since he already strongly supports it - they should instead have been aimed at the other Cambridgeshire MPs like the cabinet-minister-to-be in the constituency next door. Fortunately he's able to (and did) write a perl script to reply to them all. I expect it would cause rather more of a problem for most MPs.

The correct way to argue that the 38degrees mail is not spam is to note that it meets only one of the two basic criteria: it is bulk mail but it isn't unsolicited. However it does constitute a denial-of-service attack on MPs' inboxes, especially since their campaign techniques are designed to use the Twitter echo-chamber amplification effect and the ease of drive-by caring on the Internet. The unnecessary and excessive repetition is very spammy (remember why spam is called spam!) and even if you might think their intentions are right, their actions are reckless and counterproductive and should be condemned.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Yep. My friend who is a newly-elected MP and supports PR (I'm working on her but I fear she's a lost cause) was in exactly this scenario. Actual constituents with actual real-life problems couldn't get through.

[sweh.livejournal.com]

In the "old days", writing a letter to your MP meant it took time and effort; mostly people who did it were motivated to do it and so the results meant something.

Automated form letters like the above are meaningless; it takes close to zero effort and so, essentially, raises the noise floor. Add in the ability for abuse (not jut automated submissions causing actual bulk activity, but validation of the sender) and you get something that can be a kind-of DoS against the MP; legitimate constituents email can get lost.

So even if the above isn't actual spam, it's effectively the same as and causes the same sorts of problems as spam.

I have a similar loathing of web petitions; they similarly raise the noise floor.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

There was a nasty piece of legislation working its way through the Israeli parliament recently. No need here to go into the details, but it got the majority of Diaspora Jewry really riled. Vast numbers of emails were sent from the Diaspora, many using boilerplate text (though not an automated means of sending it) to a variety of recipients including the Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. When Netanyahu's office's mailbox filled up, an alternative address was given (and that also bounced for me, being swamped by the quantity).

This was something people felt strongly about. Maybe not strongly enough to have sat down and written an old-fashioned letter, but I'm sure people wouldn't have copied and pasted the text into their email client if they didn't care about the issue. And whilst it may have been a kind-of DoS attack, I would argue that's an epiphenomenon, not an intended consequence.

The important thing, though, is that it worked: the Prime Minister backed down in his backing for the bill, which has now been rescheduled for the autumn parliamentary session, hopefully giving the disagreeing parties time to thrash out a compromise acceptable to all.

This wasn't spam, though it may have looked like it. It was real people power in action.

[(Anonymous)]

Hear hear.

S.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I disagree. I think allowing people with an opinion but fewer tuits to express that opinion is merely widening the scope of our democracy (in a small way). It doesn't take NO effort (for instance people who really don't care won't even be looking at 38degrees to start with), just less.

I think that as many people should be able to express their opinion in a constructive way as possible; and that allowing people to do so (even as only a tally of yea v. nay) easily is A Good Thing (MPs are, as ever, free to disregard the desires of their constituents; in some cases I would much prefer that they do so!).

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's spam - it's legitimate to contact an MP in this way. I'd be happier if 38 degrees put a header in the emails or a prefix on the subject line that would allow the recipients to automatically file them easily, and I think it's reasonable to expect that a form-email gets lower priority than a more personal message. If DR had asked 38deg to use an alternative email address that he (or his staff) would go through on a regular but less-frequent basis, I'd thoroughly support him in that request.

[rmc28]

I think 38 Degrees mean well but are causing a lot of additional load on email systems and supporters (including people who read them). I think they risk causing sufficient aggravation that mails sent through them get put at the bottom of the pile.

I think fanf has a story about JH writing a script to send a form response to all the form emails, which ended up triggering fanf's antispam measures. But few of the MPs can write mail scripts in order to cope ...

My first thought for improvement would be a "daily digest" kind of mail that sent the same info as MPs are currently getting (i.e. name and email address), but as a once-a-day list. And maybe display the email address "if you want to send your own message".

(Perhaps I should suggest this direct to 38 Degrees)

Certainly Julian's experience and that of a few other people I know who stood in the last election has put me right off signing anything by them. Everyone has mentioned the sheer time sucked up by dealing with the mass of emailed form letters from every pressure group under the sun. Personally, I think it's entirely reasonable to draft a form response to these and mail it straight back, so long as a tally is kept.

[songster.livejournal.com]

Are there any safeguards in place to make sure people send mail to the appropriate MP, rather than one they just happen to want to hassle? What would stop me from using it to petition every MP in the country to abolish pi?

Are there any safeguards to make sure people only mail their MP a reasonable number of times on any one issue? Looks like it would be fairly trivial to DoS David Cameron's email address, for example.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

You could lie about your postcode. But if you personally wanted to email every MP in the country there are probably easier ways than indirecting via a postcode database.

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

I think the thing to remember is that form letters are very much not taken so much account of at the other end - if an MP or several MPs start getting letters which all say the same thing, it's about as effective as signing a petition ie not very effective, although it does some good if there's enough names signing it.

It's not spam in the same way that signing a petition isn't spam.

[fanf]

The difference is that the effort to sign a petition is fairly well matched with the effort to receive the aggregated signatures, whereas 38degrees acts as an amplifier, turning a small amount of effort from many senders into a lot of hassle for the receiver.

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

I agree with that described difference between the two things, but I don't think that invalidates my point.

[fanf]

If you send someone multiple copies of the same message, that is spam.

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

But it's not a single person sending multiple copies of the same message. What is this fixation on what you call it about?

We're talking about many emails where the bulk of the email is identical to many other emails all being sent to the same person. Leaving aside the question of what you call it, is it unreasonable for an MP to expect this form of communication?

[fanf]

It's all being sent by 38degrees who ought to be polite enough to aggregate the messages from their users like a petition. It's perfectly reasonable for an MP to get annoyed by campaign groups that waste their time.

[pfy.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's spam - surely MPs have House of Commons e-mail addresses specifically so that constituents can contact them?

If I were in the MP's position, I wouldn't attach as much importance to a boilerplate e-mail as a personally-written one (on the basis that someone who writes a personal message is likely to feel more strongly about the issue and has probably thought it through in greater depth). However, form letters and e-mails are still legitimate communications from constituents, so I don't see how he can reasonably object to them.

If people abuse the contact system on that website to DoS or otherwise harass MPs, however, that's Bad.

The "daily digest" idea sounds like a decent one for reducing the volume of e-mails while still allowing a tally of how many people have contacted the MP about a given topic.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I have an email address so people can contact me, but that doesn’t stop a portion of what I get sent from being spam.

They might feel that a lobby group sending them mail with a constituent’s name on is a bit different from a constituent actually contacting them, too; remember it’s not the constituent who is writing the email in this case.

[pfy.livejournal.com]

The constituent may not be writing the content (unless they choose to edit the boilerplate message, which the site does suggest they do), but it is still the constituent who sends the message.

Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail. If constituents each send one message on a given topic, nobody is sending "bulk" e-mail, even if it's about the same thing. I'm not sure it's even "unsolicited" either, as receiving messages from constituents is exactly what his House of Commons address is meant for.

I can see how it could get annoying and repetitive when a lot of people use the site. And I would not blame the chap for filtering all the boilerplate e-mails into a separate folder, to be answered with a boilerplate response when the secretary is sufficiently bored. But I don't think it's spam.

Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

With that definition the question’s easy. It is unsolicited (the recipient has specifically said so), it is bulk and it is email.

Re: Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail.

[pfy.livejournal.com]

If you're given a work e-mail address, you don't get to declare e-mail from the people you work for "unsolicited" and demand they stop e-mailing you.

Re: Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I think I’ll take the recipient’s view of what’s solicited over some random lobby group, on this one.

Re: Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail.

[pfy.livejournal.com]

So if an MP were to say "I don't want my constituents to e-mail me, even at my House of Commons e-mail address", do you think that any constituent e-mailing them would be wrong to do so?

This is not a trick question - I am trying to figure out exactly what your position is here.

Re: Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

If my MP asked me not to email them, I wouldn’t email them. (Or vote for them.)

This isn’t really what’s going on here though.

Re: Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail.

[pfy.livejournal.com]

That wasn't what I asked, though. Just a yes or no would do.

And yes, I know it's not what's going on here. It was purely a hypothetical, stand-alone question.

Re: Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail.

[pfy.livejournal.com]

Actually, never mind. We're probably going to end up disagreeing anyway, though I'm still not sure why.

I do think it's legitimate for constituents to contact their MPs about parliamentary matters, even if they do it via a lobby group.

I don't think it's accurate or useful to call messages from constituents "spam", even if lots of constituents do the same thing to send similar messages.

However, I do see how lots of messages can cause problems. I therefore think that 38 Degrees should work together with MPs to find a more convenient way of presenting the results of a lobbying campaign. A digest e-mail (as others have suggested) saying something like "The following people from your constituency want X to happen:" seems like a decent compromise to me, but I'll leave it to the parties concerned to work out the best solution.

I realise that some of the above are subjective judgements. If you happen to disagree then we'll just have to agree to do so.

Re: Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

But this isn’t “constituents contacting their MPs via a lobby group”. It’s “a lobby group bulk-emailing MPs with constituents’ names attached”.

Imagine someone took names and addresses in the street and then posted the resulting MPs thousands of identical letters each with one of the names they’d collected added to the bottom. That’s exactly what’s going on here; the only reason it's happening electronically is that the cost of doing it on paper is higher.

Re: Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail.

[pfy.livejournal.com]

There isn't even a distinction to be made there. Lots of constituents make the individual decision to send a boilerplate message; the result is that the MP gets lots of boilerplate messages.

Anyway, we seem to have agreed all along on the actual important matter, which is that there's a better way to do things. And fixing that means there's nothing left to argue about.

Re: Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Of course there's a distinction: who chooses the text, whose equipment sends it, how much effort is required of a human to send it. The latter is especially significant given the reason that the MP asked not to receive was email from lobbyists drowning out email directly from constituents.

Re: Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail.

[pfy.livejournal.com]

Look, I've tried more than once to bring this to a reasonable and amicable conclusion. I'm not interested in dragging up irrelevant points simply for the sake of having an argument. You're welcome to the last word if you want it; I'm bowing out here.

Re: Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what the problem is, unless "disagrees" somehow contradicts "amicable".

Re: Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail.

[(Anonymous)]

In the page linked to in the original article above, the MP says he's happy for his constituents to e-mail him (his e-mail address is easily worked out form the instructions he gives, or you could telephone the number on his House of Commons web page and ask) -- as long as it's them e-mailing him about something that concerns them enough for them to actually write an e-mail, not some web-based lobby group auto-sending form e-mails with the click of a button (and based on Richard's report, never even providing the constituent with the MP's e-mail address, just 'helpfully' sending it automatically).

Which seems fair enough.

So your hypothetical is irrelevant as it is not the situation in question.

S.

Re: Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail.

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

See, what's going on here is people asking "Can we call it spam, because if we can, then it is Baaaaaad."

I think your header beautifully describes an aspect of the form that this form letter shares with spam. Maybe people should be asking whether or not that aspect of the form is Baaaaaad, because what you call it is just a distraction.

MO is that recieving unsolicited email is part of an MP's job description.

Re: Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail.

[sweh.livejournal.com]

This is why I didn't call it actually spam, but effectively the same as spam.

The MP's HoC email address is there, in part, explicitly to provide an address for constituents to email their MP. Any email from a constituent is not unsolicited as a result. An MP can not legitimately request that constituents not use their HoC email address; it's part of their job.

The problem is not with email being sent to the MP; it's how the email is being sent.

Re: Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail.

[(Anonymous)]

Surely whether it happens to meet some arbitrary definition of 'spam' is about the least important aspect of the situation?

There are actual issues here, and while I know that the geek's instinctive reaction is to try to reduce everything to a question of semantics, getting stuck here in 'what exactly is the definition of spam?' and 'does this meet that definition?' is not going to help anybody engage with those issues.

S.

Re: Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail.

[pm215]

Well, the utility of the definition of 'spam' is that it's basically a consensus about where it's reasonable to wheel out the big guns of blocking mail, complaining to ISPs, and the rest of it.

But I think that in this case the better solution is probably for MPs and 38degrees to come to some saner arrangement, which makes the 'spam' question (a) moot and (b) a possibly unhelpful line of argument which will just put one side's backs up.

Re: Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail.

[sweh.livejournal.com]

Not all email abuse is spam; spam is merely one form of email abuse. The big guns can be rolled out for more than just spam. If I was an MP I would consider dumping to /dev/null any mail from 38degrees and similar, considering it an abuse of email.

Re: Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Sure, but if you conclude "yes it's spam" then you don't need to care about any other kind of abuse, you just stop it.

Re: Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail.

[(Anonymous)]

So part of the definition of spam is 'should be stopped'?

Really, doing ethics by taxonomy is about the least helpful way to go about it.

S.

Re: Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

No, that's not part of the definition of spam, any more than part of the definition of murder is "should be stopped".

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

Whether or not it's spam, I can see why an MP would be annoyed to receive this kind of thing. It's a petition, really, but delivered in the most annoying way.