Remember the Email Wars of 2007, when Chris Dodd would send an email designed to look like it was quickly tapped out on a BlackBerry, and Barack Obama would do the same (plagiarist!) two days later? Then Bill Richardson would forward a message from his staffer as if he was sending pictures of cats around the office; Obama would return fire by having one of his supporters send us an email in his stead; and Dodd remained the king by sending yet more stripped-down emails featuring impressive brevity and lack of HTML formatting. Those were the days.

I miss those days because they're clearly over.

There's very little online enthusiasm for John McCain's candidacy, despite his way-out-in-frontrunner status. But that doesn't mean he's abandoned the web. Like the other candidates, he's using email, YouTube (a little bit), and Facebook. No Twitter yet. But apart from the small issue that he isn't getting the conservative base fired up, there's another problem: he may not be using these tools very well.

Case in point: his most recent email clocks in at a whopping 497 words, or 3.55 Twitter posts that reach the 140 character limit (maybe we should use a "TWT:EMAIL" ratio to describe the brevity of candidate emails).

But the length is just half the problem. A campaign email is centered around the ask, which needs to be front and center. Yet this email scans very badly; it's hard to tell what Sen. McCain is asking for, and how to do what he wants. It comes across as a vague thank you and a rambling description of why he's running his campaign, accompanied by a nice picture that you click on to get a special message...

Oh! Duh. It's all about the picture. When you click on it you're taken to a donation page and video from John. Maybe that's what his campaign was counting on.

But the only reference to the video, and thus the donation page, is in the image -- and many users won't see it if their email client is blocking images or they're viewing the stripped-down text.

Sigh. Where's Chris Dodd's team when you need them?