Advocates blamed for WhiteHouse.gov e-mail list goof

After individuals went on Fox News and took to the Internet last week complaining they'd received unsolicited e-mails from the White House, the administration said it would change how it collects addresses. That's a good idea, e-mail experts say, because the White House has plenty of room for improvement.

"I would grade their e-mail collection process as an F," said Marco Marini, CEO of ClickMail Marketing, citing privacy and e-mail campaign effectiveness concerns.

The box at the top of WhiteHouse.gov allows anyone to subscribe by simply typing in an e-mail address and ZIP code. What's stopping my friend, or political opponent, from signing me up, Marini wondered? Adding an e-mail confirmation step would be "very easy to implement and would save a lot of headaches," he said.

Most sites that users must register for -- from newspapers to banks to stores -- send a confirmation to the e-mail addresses provided before beginning to use the address to communicate with the user. Though the White House said it was changing its e-mail collection process, Marini's basic suggestion is not among the changes made.

"We are implementing measures to make subscribing to e-mails clearer, including preventing advocacy organizations from signing people up to our lists without permission when they deliver petition signatures and other messages on individual's behalf," White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said in a statement last week.

The White House's online director, Macon Phillips, followed that up with a blog post reiterating their suspicion that outside groups were signing up individuals without their permission and saying that changes had been made.

"It has come to our attention that some people may have been subscribed to our e-mail lists without their knowledge -- likely as a result of efforts by outside groups of all political stripes -- and we regret any inconvenience caused by receiving an unexpected message," Phillips wrote in the blog post. "We have ... implemented measures on WhiteHouse.gov to boost the security of the mailing list and we will carefully evaluate signups already received to work toward preventing this problem in the future."

What are the new measures Phillips mentions in the blog post? The only noticeable one is a CAPTCHA -- the disfigured words used to confuse automated computer programs -- on WhiteHouse.gov's "Contact Us" page, where a contact form requires an e-mail address and the sender is given the option of clicking a box to subscribe to e-mail updates. The White House believes groups were using this feature to send petitions to the administration from its members' e-mail addresses, resulting in the unsolicited e-mails.

But elsewhere on the site, users can still sign up directly for e-mail updates by simply inputting an e-mail address and ZIP code.

Schapiro declined to comment on whether the White House would add an e-mail confirmation step in its collection process.