How do I unsubscribe from ALL Democratic fundraising emails?
February 11, 2020 9:24 AM   Subscribe

I donated to a bunch of congressional races a couple of years ago through the DCCC when they called me, and now I keep getting emails from random Democratic congressional candidates from all over. I unsubscribe to every one, but I keep getting more of them and I think they're all coming from NGP Van or somesuch. My internet searching hasn't turned up a way to centrally unsubscribe from all such emails. If you've had any success in doing so, how did you do it?
posted by coolname to Computers & Internet (9 answers total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: I don't know, but you can get a similar effect from using a filter on your email for the word "unsubscribe" in the body of the email (since all of these sorts of emails have to contain that) and "Democrat" anywhere in the email. You can send any email that fits that profile to a separate folder and just never look in the folder.
posted by joannemerriam at 9:53 AM on February 11, 2020 [2 favorites]


Your best bet may be to create an email rule that just dumps them to the spam folder or deletes them.
posted by tman99 at 9:54 AM on February 11, 2020 [1 favorite]


I think the DCCC have multiple "lists", even though they all look like they're coming from the same place and you need to unsub from each. I did the unsubscribe on several emails and the torrent of hyperbolic subject lines has shrunk, but I still get a handful from time to time (mine are already getting shunted to the 'spam' folder).
posted by AzraelBrown at 2:21 PM on February 11, 2020


Ugh, I feel your pain. The Democratic candidate emails are the only ones where I feel like my name and email have been shared well beyond what I ever intended. I have a secondary email account I use for just this sort of thing, and it's been annoying even there. The emails are often from some new candidate.

I have been unsubscribing from every one I've gotten, and I feel like it's mostly slowed down.
posted by bluedaisy at 2:26 PM on February 11, 2020 [4 favorites]


Gmail automagically puts these into spam for me. It's one of the main reasons I've stayed with them so long.

If only I could also filter texts. The ludicrous number of spam texts makes me never want to donate again. Bernie Sanders, I'm looking at you
posted by fshgrl at 3:59 PM on February 11, 2020


I just tweeted at NGP VAN on twitter, asking if there was a way to be removed from all their lists. I'll let you know if they respond.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 4:59 PM on February 11, 2020 [1 favorite]


Best answer: What worked for me was sending a message to NGP VAN's support email address and asking to be removed from their database. I still get emails like this from time to time, but it's waaay more manageable now.
posted by panic at 10:37 PM on February 11, 2020


If your email does any automatic spam filtering, mark them as spam. That results in similar emails getting spam-tagged, as well. They're going to keep selling your name, so it's a game of whack-a-mole. Gmail is so cat that it's able to do a good job with this
posted by theora55 at 6:30 AM on February 12, 2020


Best answer: In my experience you cannot get yourself removed. Ever. The problem is you'll remove yourself from some specific list (say "fund Candidate X for Q1 2020") and then you'll just be added to the next list ("fund for Q2 2020"). There's no reliable way to remove yourself from the master lists. Winnie' and panic's suggestion of trying to get off the NGP VAN list itself is a good one; that's one of the more important master lists. But I tried that and still failed. So what to do?

1. Train your email system. I use Gmail. You can just "mark as spam" and Gmail does a pretty good job learning you don't want political solicitations over time, but it's not great. I create custom rules that skip my Inbox instead. Any time I receive email from Candidate X, I make a filter to block all mail from *@candidatex.com, or whatever domain name they're using.

2. Protect yourself in the future. You are legally required to provide name and mailing address with campaign donations. But there is no legal requirement to provide phone number or email address. So I avoid entering them or give special purpose ones when I donate. That won't help stop spam for your previous donations, and it won't really stop a determined candidate who's buying a voter file with all your data already in it. But it still seems to help some.

It could be worse; I've donated enough money that I get personal phone calls from senate candidates. (Turns out that amount is shockingly low.) I'm now getting calls from people I've never heard of in states I've never visited.

I wish the Democrats would implement a do-not-call list for opt-outs. But they have no legal obligation to do so (political fundraising is protected speech) and I imagine don't understand how fundraising contributes to voter fatigue. It's every candidate for themself mostly.
posted by Nelson at 8:23 AM on February 12, 2020


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