Donald Trump can't use his email list after 4 in 5 of his fundraising messages were flagged as spam

(Image credit: John Sommers II/Getty Images)

last updated 11 July 2016

Presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad time with email fundraising.

His first large-scale email pitch, sent late last month, earned rebukes from politicians in Iceland, Scotland, and Australia who were bizarrely — and illegally — on his list. About four in five of those messages were flagged by spam filters, and nearly "60 percent of the fundraiser emails from Trump never reached inboxes."

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Though Trump can still send blasts to rented or borrowed lists while his own is out of commission, his email campaigns have reportedly experienced an unusually bounce rate, which means too many email addresses on the lists he can use are fake, have full inboxes, or are otherwise nonfunctional. A normal bounce rate is 1.2 percent, and some of the Trump lists reportedly have bounce rates higher than 30 percent.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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