That survey was hilarious.
Do you suppose they'll believe that my real name is Four Chan and my zip code is 90210?
There was a thing going around on FB that building Trump's mailing list is just putting money in his pocket (even if you give a fake address). I suspect the "Trump is upset" line is a bit of kayfabe to whip up more addresses and donations from supporters. It's self-evident nobody gives a shit how the actual survey turns out.
I didn't fill out the survey, but it is remarkable and worth reading. One of my reactions was that they clearly don't have many layers of people reviewing and vetting a document like that -- it reads like it was constructed by an intern and received a cursory review.
2: How do fake email addresses help? Like there's some contractor that gets paid by the address?
The guy writing the contract has a shitty intern too.
I looked up a zip code for Peoria specifically to submit for the survey. And put in an email ending in .horse, which is a real thing now.
I don't know anything about the list-selling, but presumably any list is going to have "shrinkage" since even valid addresses are going to bounce some of the time for various reasons. I'm not sure how you negotiate the probable shrinkage, since it's pretty hard to guess, in the general case, which well-formed addresses are probably fake and impossible, in principle, to distinguish a committed conservative from a liberal troll on username alone.
At one point I had figured out the work emails of several high-level people at the RNC, and I used them as my go-to fake email addresses.
Apparently they've relaunched the poll at a new URL, which just makes no sense. I never seriously thought they were planning to release the numbers. How could anybody possibly think they mean anything? (I don't need any lectures on Trump's idiocy/gullibility here. Are his push-pollsters really holding out for solid numbers to please the boss?)
Someone, presumably, named Arlen [my last name] signed up for a (many?) Trump/Republican website. I get the worst spam now - lots of fake Wal-Mart gift certificates really bother me. I'm off the official mailing list but ugh, just awful. And sometimes spam with blinking emojis somehow slip through gmail's adblocker and I'm just horrified by how that is even possible.
Anyway, Arlen you can go fuck yourself you horrible man.
11: you can block the sender addresses in gmail, yes? Or even just flagging them as spam should rapidly result in them not showing up in your inbox. I got spam from some sham medical outlet, that I'd never heard of. tried to unsubscrie, to no avail. So I just marked 'em as spam. Stopped seeing 'em after 2 messages thus marked. A cursory scan of my spam folder a while back found one email from those jokers.
So it seems to work.
And for sure, blocking the sender email does -- heh, maybe too well, actually.
When I was young and immature, I signed up my roommate for the gun repair course of some correspondence school advertised by Sally Struthers. You could watch as the mailing lists got sold to less and less reputable groups. It went from "buy these nice guns" to "and I don't need to bother to explain to you why Bill Clinton is going to trigger the apocalypse but you might want to buy a book with some details."
. I never seriously thought they were planning to release the numbers. How could anybody possibly think they mean anything?
I don't think they are going to release the numbers, but I do look forward to seeing them leaked.
Back in the dark ages before routine email someone in high school thought it would be funny to submit my name and physical address to some porn of the month club, so I kept getting X rated video catalogs.
15 I would have never guessed but then rule 34 must predate the internet. "April is midget clown porn month!"
April is midget clown porn month!
YOU KNOW NOTHING OF MY WORK.
12: They mostly do go to the spam folder, it's just that I have some particularities about my email numbers (I keep my inbox to 0 unread and seeing the spam folder keep creeping up and up makes me slightly stressed so I erase it manually daily. I sometimes get real emails in my spam folder so I can't automatically erase. Also I semi-enjoy academic spam because it makes me feel like I've made it (for a low value of 'made it') but this stuff is just bottom of the barrel spam).
The academic spam really bothers me. Not so much by volume, but the fact that they are clearly crossing over into actual catfishing.
I'm having more problems with text spam recently. I forward them on to my service's reporting line.
Received just now: "Tam#RAND_DIGIT(2-4) is my username,Can y" -- followed by a URL.
I filled it out! I used McConnell's senate email address.
I'm not sure if I'm more offended from an ideological perspective or from a survey-construction perspective.
21: Yeah, my wife winced at the blatancy. (She's taken media theory and similar classes.) It comes across as something delegated to an intern without any real review.
Though fair is fair... this is an also absurdly biased survey. DNC Leadership Survey
It says something bad about me that this is the bit of political action I've engaged in. I mean, yeah, I went to the women's march, and I donate money to the appropriate nonprofits, but still.
23: The thing that jumps out at me about it is lowering the survey-takers' expectations. "Given The Democratic Party's Minority Position In Congress..."