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Today’s post is brought to you courtesy of the Republican Party of Maine. A Politico story indicates that the recent Maine caucuses had some votes that did not get counted because the emails with the vote tallies were caught in a spam filter.

Lessons learned:

1. It can happen to anyone, even with wanted, expected mail. These emails were expected to arrive on the night of the caucus, and the state party did want to know the results.
2. Spam filters cannot read someone’s mind. Spam filters use a series of rules to determine if an email is to be considered spam or not. These emails tripped those rules somehow, whether that was a result of the reputation of the mail sent by other people at their ISPs or due to the way the message was formatted, we don’t know. But the spam filter had to apply the same rules to those emails as it does to all other messages. The filter cannot intuitively know that today is somehow special.
3. Not everyone checks their spam folder. You might expect that state party officials would have checked the spam folder when they realized that not everything was in. But, like many other people out there, the spam folder is something that will get checked every few weeks — it is not part of their regular checking and viewing habits.

So, how do you plan for and work with those lessons?  Leave a comment!