Email Lists and Consent

Email is the cheapest way a small campaign reaches the same person ten times. The case for email, the benchmark numbers, the technical setup of SPF, DKIM and DMARC records and a six-tool price comparison are in Email Lists: The Owned Audience. This lesson is the campaign side: where names come from, what law and private rules say about consent, how the Idaho voter list fits, and what happens to the list when the race is over.

Where a campaign list comes from

Every good list starts with people who chose to be on it. The sources differ in how much consent they carry and how much work they take to turn into usable records.

Source	Consent quality	What to capture	Common mistake
Website sign-up form	Strong, if the form says what they will get	Name, email, ZIP or address, date and time, form wording	A pre-checked box for texts
Event sign-in sheet or tablet	Good, if the sheet has a consent line at the top	Same, plus event name and date	Typing illegible addresses months later
Your own petition or pledge (not an official ballot petition)	Good, if the page says signers will hear from you	Same, plus which petition	Hiding the list use in small print
Donors through a donation platform	Depends on the platform's checkbox and terms	Platform export with its opt-in field	Assuming every donor agreed to newsletters
Business cards and personal contacts	Weak; they gave you a card, not a subscription	Send one personal note asking them to join	Bulk-adding a phone's contacts
Bought, rented or appended lists	None you can prove	Do not mail	Getting the account shut down

Official petitions are a separate case. Signature sheets for a statewide initiative or referendum become official public records once filed with the Secretary of State (Idaho Code 34-1806), and the sheets exist to put a measure on the ballot. Keep a separate, clearly labeled sign-up sheet on the circulator's clipboard for people who want updates, and never copy emails from the official sheet. Circulating Petitions covers what the official sheet may contain.

What CAN-SPAM covers, and what it does not

The CAN-SPAM Act, 15 U.S.C. 7701 and following, with the FTC's rules at 16 CFR Part 316, regulates "commercial electronic mail messages." Section 7702(2)(A) defines that as any email "the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service." Transactional or relationship messages, such as a receipt for a purchase, are carved out. A reference or link to a commercial entity does not by itself make a message commercial if its primary purpose is something else (7702(2)(D)).

The FTC's compliance guide, as of October 2026, does not address political or nonprofit email as a category. It sorts content into commercial, transactional or relationship, and "other," and for mixed messages looks at the subject line and at where and how prominently the commercial content appears. Applied to a campaign:

• Usually outside CAN-SPAM: a policy update, a hearing alert, a volunteer request, a voting reminder, a donation appeal to support a candidate. None promotes a commercial product or service.
• Likely inside: an email whose main point is selling campaign T-shirts, hats or tickets from a store, or one that promotes a sponsor's business.
• Mixed: a newsletter with a merchandise banner at the top and a subject line about the sale is being treated as commercial by the guide's logic. Put merchandise at the bottom, or send it on its own and follow the Act for that message.

The Act's requirements are short: accurate header and routing information, no deceptive subject lines, identify a commercial message as an ad, a valid physical postal address, a clear way to opt out, opt-outs honored within 10 business days, and an opt-out mechanism that keeps working for at least 30 days after sending. The guide also says a business stays responsible for email others send on its behalf, and lists penalties of up to $53,088 per violating email as of October 2026. Since Gmail and Yahoo demand most of the same things anyway, the practical rule is to meet CAN-SPAM in every message.

Disclaimers on email

Federal and Idaho rules differ. For federal races, 11 CFR 110.11(a)(1) requires a disclaimer on "electronic mail of more than 500 substantially similar communications when sent by a political committee," and on "all websites and internet applications of political committees available to the general public." A congressional campaign's newsletter to 600 people needs its "paid for by" statement.

Idaho's attribution statute, 67-6614A, covers paid communications expressly advocating a vote "through any broadcasting station, newspaper, magazine, outdoor advertising facility, direct mailing or any other type of general public political advertising." Email is not named. The Secretary of State's Guidance 2026-5 (September 11, 2026) says "emails to members" and unpaid social posts generally do not require reporting, while it lists "paid broadcast messages via radio, TV, text, or social media" among paid political activities. A paid send to a rented list of voters looks more like advertising than a newsletter does. Put the committee name and postal address in every email footer and the question goes away. Lesson 06 covers digital disclaimers in depth.

Why consent matters even when the law does not require it

The rules that decide whether your email arrives are private ones. Starting February 1, 2024, Google's email sender guidelines require every sender to Gmail accounts to set up SPF or DKIM, keep valid forward and reverse DNS, use TLS and keep spam rates in Postmaster Tools below 0.3 percent. Senders of more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail must also set up SPF and DKIM and a DMARC policy, align the From domain, and support one-click unsubscribe on marketing and subscribed messages with a visible unsubscribe link. Elsewhere on the same page, Google says to keep spam rates "below 0.10%" and "avoid ever reaching a spam rate of 0.30% or higher."

Yahoo's sender requirements for bulk senders, as of October 2026, require SPF and DKIM, a DMARC policy of at least "p=none," a working one-click unsubscribe header plus a visible link, unsubscribes honored "within 2 days," and a spam rate "below 0.3%," calculated on mail delivered to the inbox.

Rule (as of October 2026)	Gmail, all senders	Gmail, 5,000+ a day	Yahoo, bulk senders
Authentication	SPF or DKIM	SPF and DKIM, plus DMARC (p=none allowed) with From alignment	SPF and DKIM, DMARC at least p=none
Unsubscribe	Not listed for all senders	One-click plus visible link	One-click header plus visible link, honored within 2 days
Spam rate	Below 0.3 percent	Below 0.30 percent; aim below 0.10	Below 0.3 percent of inbox-delivered mail

Nothing in these rules mentions politics. A campaign gets no exemption. A small list that people asked to join will rarely draw complaints; a list padded with names who never asked will, and a spam rate problem on one send can follow the domain into the next.

Email platforms enforce consent too, through their terms. Mailchimp's Acceptable Use Policy, last updated September 26, 2025, bars members from sending to "purchased, rented, third-party, co-reg, publicly available data, or partner lists" and says senders "must be able to point to an opt-in form or show other evidence of consent." The policy does not mention political campaigns at all; the word "campaigns" there means email campaigns. Other services set their own rules; read the acceptable use policy before importing anything, and look for whether the service limits which causes it serves.

The Idaho voter list

Idaho's voter list is public. Under Idaho Code 34-437, each county clerk must supply anyone who asks with a current list of the county's registered voters and their addresses, grouped by precinct, for the cost of reproducing it. Under 34-437A(3), the Secretary of State furnishes the statewide list on the same cost basis.

Both sections carry the same restriction. No one who receives a list, "and no person who acquires a list" prepared from it, may use it to mail or deliver an advertisement or offer for property, an establishment, an organization, a product or a service, or a solicitation "for money, services, or anything of value." Then: "Provided however, that any such list and label may be used for any political purpose."

That last sentence and the solicitation ban sit uneasily together for fundraising. One reading treats a campaign donation ask as a political purpose; another reads the solicitation ban to cover fundraising mail even from a campaign, and The Campaign Plan and the Budget in course 48 takes the cautious view that the list may not be used to mail fundraising appeals. Until the Secretary of State says otherwise in writing, use the voter list to persuade and turn out voters, and raise money from people who joined your own list.

What the list contains matters for email. In a July 3, 2017 statement, the Secretary of State described the statewide list as including names, addresses, county, gender, age (not date of birth), an optional phone number, declared party affiliation and whether each voter took part in each election, not how anyone voted. Date of birth, driver's license numbers, partial Social Security numbers and signatures are not public. There are no email addresses. The voter file can tell you who your list members are and where they vote; it cannot add people to your email list.

List hygiene

A clean list delivers better and costs less, since plans like Mailchimp's are priced by the number of contacts. Mailchimp's free plan, as of October 2026, stops at 250 contacts and 500 sends a month (250 a day), and its Essentials plan starts at $13 a month, per its pricing page. Every dead address costs money and drags down engagement.

Task	How often	Why
Remove hard bounces	After every send (most platforms do it automatically)	Repeated sends to dead addresses hurt reputation
Process unsubscribes everywhere	Within 2 days, in every tool you use	Yahoo's 2-day rule; CAN-SPAM's 10 business days as the legal outer limit for commercial mail
Fix typos (gmial.com, yaho.com)	At import	Catches paper-sheet errors before they bounce
Suppress role addresses (info@, office@)	At import	Shared inboxes rarely belong to the person who signed up
Re-confirm or remove the long inactive	Every three to six months	People who never click are the likeliest to mark spam
Export a full backup with consent fields	Monthly	Your proof of consent if an account is suspended (lesson 10)

Low-cost platforms and their rules

Course 70 compares six newsletter tools on price, as of October 2026, in its email lesson; that comparison is not repeated here. For a campaign, these questions matter more than price:

• Does the terms of service allow your use? Read the acceptable use policy for list sources, political content and any limit on which causes the service will serve. At least one widely used advocacy tool limits its service by cause, per the course 70 comparison.
• Can you export everything, including consent fields? If the account is closed, the export is the list.
• Who in the campaign owns the account? Register it with a campaign address and campaign card (lesson 01), and add a second admin.

Donation platforms often collect emails too. Read what their checkbox says. A donor who gave on a platform page did not necessarily agree to your weekly newsletter, and the export usually shows who opted in.

Sharing, renting and the end of the campaign

An email list is an asset. Under Idaho Code 67-6602(3), a contribution includes the transfer of "anything of value," and non-money contributions are valued at fair market value. Lists are sold and rented, so they have a market value. A campaign that hands its list free to a candidate is probably making an in-kind contribution that counts against the limit and appears on both reports; a campaign that receives one is probably receiving one. The same thinking applies to a PAC or nonprofit sharing its list with a candidate. Get the elections division's answer before the transfer.

Your own sign-up wording also limits what you can do. If the form said "we will never share your information," then sharing it breaks the promise you used to collect it, whatever the law allows. Losing campaigns often keep the list for the next race or for issue work; tell the list what is happening and give them an easy way out.