I covered The Anatomy of a Perfect Email last month, so now is a good time for a quick follow-up:

Campaign Monitor, the best damn email marketing company out there, released a set of Email Design Guidelines, a technical guide that everyone should keep handy. Even more technical is their Guide to CSS Support in Email, which takes some of the guesswork out of what styling you should and shouldn’t use in your emails.

Over at ONE/Northwest, former Moveon.org Advocacy Director Ben Brandzel goes over Four Rules for Effective Email Alerts. Covering both structure and content, it’s a good, quick read from someone who pioneered email advocacy.

Last but not least, Colin Delaney over at e.politics has just put out a new version of his Online Politics 101 Ebook. The whole thing is great, and there are quite a few pages devoted to email strategy.

The Obama campaign has launched a microsite at FightTheSmears.com, debunking the attacks du jour against him (and his wife): No video exists of Michelle Obama using the word “whitey”, Barack isn’t a Muslim, and he actually does put his hand over his heart when saying the Pledge of Allegiance. But why exactly did the campaign feel compelled to do this, and why won’t we be seeing a similar site from the McCain campaign? A quick visit to Snopes.com may offer an explanation.

The spread of email hoaxes has been around since the beginning of the Tubes, and Snopes.com, a site dedicated to debunking or confirming urban legends, has been around for nearly as long. Because of email’s ubiquitous presence in our lives, it’s unsurprising that the most popular urban legends viewed on the site originate from email chain letters.

Most urban legends in Snopes.com’s Hot 25 list deal with computer viruses, cell phones, missing children, and things related to consumerism. But the decidedly political items all have an overt ideological and rightward bent to them:

• 2. is dedicated to all things Obama.
• 4. is a pro-Bush, but fake, essay by Jay Leno.
• 9. is a false rumor that Speaker Pelosi plans to implement a 100% tax on “stock market windfall profits”.
• 19. details various email chains about Hugo Chavez, his remarks about President Bush, and Citgo, Venezuela’s state-controlled oil company. While the first email detailed actually seems to be anti-Bush, it is so over the top that it appears to be an effort to link liberals in America with Chavez. Other emails speak of boycotting Citgo as a countermeasure against ‘American haters”.
• 20. is a false rumor about the “In God We Trust” motto being removed from US coins.
• 25. is a compilation of emails circulating about Social Security. All false items are uniformly anti-Social Security.

To be sure, there have been many hoax chain letters spread with left-leaning or anti-Bush slants to them. But the popular ones today all seem to be conservative in nature. And they’re quite effective, as evidenced by the Obama campaign’s new microsite.

Why are conservatives more apt to spread these emails around? The most reasonable explanation is that it’s a natural extension to talk radio, which has been dominated by the right for decades. But that’s just my conjecture, and as a partisan Democrat, I certainly don’t claim to understand the conservative mind. What do you think?

A quick note about the Law of Unintended Consequences in action: A post on Crooks and Liars earlier this afternoon reported:

It appears that the RNC is pretty happy with the number of “friends” it has on Facebook. Their thinking apparently is that it bodes well for the November election, as they for the first time have more than the DNC. I’ve heard rumors they’re shopping that story to some friendly reporters. If you’d like to make them look ridiculous, you can join the Democratic Party’s Facebook group here.

Apparently, the RNC Facebook group, in the midst of a membership drive according the graphic on their page, had passed the DNC Facebook group at somewhere around the 11,000 member mark. A few hours later, Markos posted the news on a Daily Kos Open Thread, and the lead the RNC group had quickly vanished.

To pour salt on their Republican wounds, within two and a half hours of the Daily Kos post, the DNC Facebook group reached 15,000 members, the original goal of the RNC (which remains well under 12,000 at the time of this writing). A few lessons out of this, in no particular order:

• Daily Kos has a huge readership. A front-page post is seen by more eyeballs than most national organizations get when they send out email blasts.
• Don’t brag about social media numbers. They’re a fickle beast.
• Republicans can’t copy Democratic strategies and expect to win. Democrats own Facebook. Deal with it and move on to another battleground.

And so it goes, in the wacky intersection of politics and technology…