Which Presidential Candidate Is Ruling the Email Election? [INFOGRAPHIC]

Email may seem old-school when compared to this year’s digital election forerunners of Twitter and Facebook. But nonetheless, the inbox has still proved a crucial tool for this year’s presidential candidates, especially when it comes to crowdsourcing campaign funds.

But inboxes, and their users alike, have grown accustomed to receiving a political pleas via email, making it that much harder for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to slide by spam filters and reach their constituency.

Email analysts Return Path dived into the data surrounding each candidate’s message to see if what they send is actually being read.

They found that GMail users tend to favor Obama and Yahoo! users skew Republican. Data also showed 5% of Obama’s sent election emails were being marked as spam in the inboxes of their receivers, whereas only 0.8% of Romney email recipients would categorize the GOP as a spammer.

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Return Path also found that Obama’s campaign slogan “Forward” didn’t apply very much to his email strategy â€" only 0.04% of the President’s emails were being forwarded to other readers. Romney, on the other hand, had 6% of his emails sent along to a new person.

But Obama does have a larger email pool to draw from: He has five times more email subscribers than his Republican counterpart â€" that could explain his larger percentage of ignored mails. Nonetheless, Obama’s more substantial email contact list means more chances at raising more funds through the Internet. Romney stands to make less than $2.3 million from emailing, which is less than one-tenth of what Obama’s messages draw.

Check out the infographic below for more details.

Is there a digital election strategy that you think one of the candidates are using really well? Tell us what you think in the comments below.

Mashable explores the trends changing politics in 2012 and beyond in Politics Transformed: The High Tech Battle for Your Vote, an in-depth look at how digital media is reshaping democracy.

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