ProPublica Message Machine

Dear Person Like You,

A few months ago, when we noticed the Obama campaign was sending out many versions of the same email, we put out a call for our readers to forward us their copy of the message, hoping it would shed light on the sophisticated ways in which political campaigns target voters. About 200 of you did, and we found that the campaign had actually created six distinct variations of that single email.

Now we want to do that kind of analysis for every email from every campaign.

But we can only do it if you forward us your emails.

Do you get emails from political campaigns? If you do, forward them to:

emails@messagemachine.propublica.org

When we get enough emails, we’ll open up this site to show how campaigns are targeting voters based on age, location, donation level and many other factors.

But more importantly, we’ll show you how the campaigns are targeting you. The more emails you forward us, the better we’ll get at showing you what campaigns know about you. After you forward us your first email, we’ll send you one back with instructions on how to sign up to see your stats.

Stuff like this fascinates me, so you can bet I’ve already started participating in this project.