Help! They've got our e-mail addresses and they can't shut up!

Those who were masochistic enough to sign up for e-mail from any of the '08 presidential candidates have gotten exactly what they asked for during the seemingly longest campaign in America's history: e-mail…lots and lots of it.

Messages alternately purporting to be from the candidates, their campaign managers, family members and other supporters arrive pretty much on a daily basis except for weekends.

But is the nonstop barrage of messages helping?

While the Internet is playing a more important role than ever in presidential politics this year, e-mail apparently is not the main driver of the candidates' Web traffic — though you wouldn't know it from the looks of their online marketing strategies.

According to Email Data Source — a company that tracks e-mails sent by organizations and uses information from Web-site tracking firm Alexa to measure corresponding traffic to the organizations' sites — the flow of visitors to the presidential contenders' campaign Web properties is far more affected by events than messages sent to supporters. “It's pretty clear that primaries, endorsements and issues work at driving traffic,” says president and CEO Bill McCloskey. “The spikes aren't e-mail related.”

For example, Barack Obama's Web site received 10 times more visitors than the other two candidates just after New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson endorsed him on March 21. Moreover, traffic to Hillary Clinton's and Obama's sites spiked pretty much equally around the Pennsylvania primary and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright fiasco at the end of April. Obama and Clinton regularly outpace Sen. John McCain's site activity, but this could change once the Democratic nominee is chosen and begins running against McCain.

Still, all three candidates clearly are taking their e-mail efforts extremely seriously.

Search on Google using the terms “Barack Obama” or “John McCain” and sponsored links to their campaigns appear. (Clinton's campaign evidently hasn't bought her name to trigger keyword search ads, though she sends more e-mail than the other two.)

Clicking on Obama's and McCain's sponsored links takes users straight to a page where the importance campaigns place on gathering supporters' e-mail addresses is obvious. Obama even asks for the address personally in a video that begins playing automatically. “The first step [for participating in his campaign] is to sign up so that we can send you invitations to campaign events and let you know about the opportunities to get involved,” Obama says.

The significance of these online efforts can be traced to the growing influence of small donors; people's increasing willingness to make financial transactions online; and the candidates' recognition that the Internet makes it possible to interact with supporters as never before.

Small donors became a key force in presidential elections after the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (or McCain-Feingold, as it's commonly known), which imposed new limits on what individuals could give.

At the same time, e-mail has given the presidential candidates unprecedented, inexpensive access to their respective faithful to hit them up for cash, and they're taking full advantage of it. Also, their messages are not just fundraising efforts, though almost every message asks for a donation. Through e-mail, the candidates are addressing current issues, sometimes the day they happen. What's more, they're motivating supporters to make telemarketing calls for them, forward e-mail messages to friends and family, start clubs, and make their own Web pages and online videos.

Of the three viable candidates as of this writing in late April, Barack Obama was getting steadily more Web site activity than either Clinton or McCain. He also was reportedly drawing more of his donations from people giving $200 or less than the other two.

According to Email Data Source, Obama attracted about a third more Web site visits than Clinton and two-thirds more than McCain. Spikes in Obama's Web traffic also were much higher than those of the other two candidates for the first four months of 2008.

However, at the end of April when Obama's campaign began to struggle due to the Wright controversy, activity on Obama's and Clinton's sites spiked dramatically and identically, apparently reflecting the tightening of the Democratic contest.

“This is where people are saying ‘Shoot, this guy can't win,’” says McCloskey of the matching spikes.

Meanwhile, it's highly ironic that McCain is getting the least action from the Internet and small donors. He was the first presidential candidate to demonstrate the potential power of Internet fundraising.

After unexpectedly thumping George W. Bush in the 2000 New Hampshire presidential primary, McCain's campaign URL was shown on the screen during his entire victory speech, resulting in $1 million in online contributions in the first two days after the speech and a total of $2.2 million in the first week.

Becki Donatelli, McCain's lead Internet consultant, was quoted recently on Politico.com as saying the donations came in so fast they were straining the campaign's servers: “No one in the campaign was allowed to run reports for days because it added stress to the servers.”

While McCain was the first to demonstrate the Internet's donor potential, it was Howard Dean who showed how to put the Web's interactive capabilities to work a few years later.

For example, as of June 2003, 31,000 so-called Deaniacs had signed up at social networking site MeetUp.com to learn about Dean-related events in their areas and meet other like-minded supporters. Prior to Dean's campaign few had even heard of MeetUp.com.

Dean also pioneered the online political fundraising thermometer, a cartoon character holding a bat that site visitors could watch fill up as a fundraising drive met its goal. After one particularly successful drive that required more than one bat, Dean appeared onstage in New York holding a baseball bat.

Obama seems to have picked up where Dean left off.

On March 20, two days after his first attempt to address the Rev. Wright issue, the YouTube video of his speech on race had drawn 1.6 million views. And by the end of April, more than 750,000 people had signed up on MyBarackObama.com to work for the Illinois senator. His campaign has a certain Web 2.0 quality to it, giving supporters an unusual amount of control over efforts on his behalf: They can call voters, create fundraising pages, organize events, and find or launch local clubs to back him.

Conservative direct mail pioneer Richard Viguerie says Obama's methods indicate his campaign manager understands a fundamental element of the Internet: To be successful online, just as is happening with commercial enterprises, the candidates must be willing to give up some control over supporters' activities.

“The Internet is a bottom-up, not top-down medium,” Viguerie says. Obama's campaign has tapped “the power of leaderless organizations. You empower people at the grass roots to take off. Clearly the Obama people understand that.”

And, he adds, it's unusual that Obama's campaign manager has allowed constituents such leeway because campaign managers are notorious control freaks. “People in campaigns want to control the operation. They would deny that they would do it to the death of the campaign, but that has happened.”

Obama's and Clinton's Internet activity compared with McCain's also shows something else, according to Viguerie: The energy and passion behind the Democratic race compared with the lack of both among conservatives for McCain.

“An advantage the left has had for three or four years now, at least from an Internet standpoint, has been anger, passion and energy,” he says. (Translation: Liberals really hate George W. Bush and that hate is translating into frenzied Internet activity for their candidates.)

At the same time, since Republicans have angered their conservative base with their wild spending, “the energy's just not there. There's a certain percentage of people who are angry and disillusioned. The Republican brand has been tarnished.”

Moreover, he says, McCain isn't doing anything to energize supporters: “The Internet is a real indicator of passion and ideologically political sites are driven by energy and passion. Nobody's excited about McCain. And every time there's a spark or a flame, he throws water on it.”

Citing the late April episode in North Carolina when McCain told Republicans to stop running a commercial featuring Wright, Viguerie says: “What conservative is going to go online and write him a check after that? He is constantly throwing water on any enthusiasm that begins to develop for his candidacy.”