Help me get off political text and email spam lists

July 2, 2024 12:24 PM

I remove myself consistently with STOP and unsubscribe but more political candidates contact me every day. What can I do to be completely removed from all lists?

I made the "mistake" of volunteering for Hillary in 2016 and giving a few bucks to the DNC and now they won't leave me alone. I'm so tired of politicians from across the country asking me for money MULTIPLE times a day via text and email. I'm going to vote Democrat for as long as we have a two party system - but I don't want to hear from them ever again for any reason at all. Please tell me how to get off of these lists because I'm losing my mind.

posted by pumpkinlatte to Technology (13 answers total)

What email service are you using? I've had success via Gmail in both blocking individual repeat offenders + filtering for specific keywords and phrases, sending them straight to trash. After a year or so of being fairly mindful about setting up filters, I've managed to get rid of the bulk of my spam/solicitations, political and otherwise.
posted by ryanshepard at 12:41 PM on July 2

Most email clients have some form of Inbox filtering available. You can use this to sort mail into folders upon receipt, or just have the message deleted altogether. For example, I have rules set up to delete any email received from the .ru domain, because I don't know anybody in Russia.
posted by SPrintF at 1:06 PM on July 2

Change your party registration from Democrat to no party affiliation or independent if that is not a party in your state. It may take past this election cycle to get off the Dem sucker donator list. Do not donate any cash to any candidate. Can donate your time, but give no personal information beyond your name and a throwaway email. Then block any and every sender. Block numbers on your phone. I recently looked at the blocked numbers list on my phone and it was over 275 strong.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 1:10 PM on July 2

I’m not sure getting off the registered voter lists helps once you’re in the Democratic Party machine’s system - i literally renounced my citizenship and officially cancelled my voter registration and have a non US phone number and still get constant texts and calls and emails. The only thing that’s seemed to make a dent is filters, blocks, and reporting everything as spam
posted by congen at 1:32 PM on July 2 [2 favorites]

Before changing your registration, check your state laws on whether that would prohibit you from voting in primaries. (Also, I'm not sure changing your party registration is actually going to get you off of these lists.)

I'm sorry I don't have any helpful suggestions for you; the two suggestions above about adding email filters are probably your best bet for emails.

These articles suggest blocking unknown texters:

How do you stop political texts on your phone?, CBS News
Sick of political text messages? Here’s how to stop them , The Hill

You could also try contacting your local Democratic party office and ask them to mark you Do Not Contact in the voter list (often they use VAN, but maybe they're using something else these days). I don't know if that would help, but it shouldn't hurt.

Good luck!
posted by kristi at 1:34 PM on July 2 [3 favorites]

I get texts from both parties due to ill-advisedly registering for a Trump rally during a TikTok action. It has nothing to do with your party affiliation. I wish to pass on that at least the Republican text systems respond to "F*** off" as if you had texted "Stop" which gives me at least some satisfaction.

I use a Yahoo email address for political donations, and Yahoo has excellent spam filtering, so I don't have problems with emails.
posted by Peach at 2:02 PM on July 2 [3 favorites]

I managed to reach someone at the primary email / text service for one major US party and got my email added to their "don't spam this person no matter what candidate is using our software" list.

That cut down on things tremendously.
posted by zippy at 2:25 PM on July 2 [2 favorites]

Ugh, I feel your pain. I get texts and emails (from Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin just in the past week!). I donate to some local campaigns most election rounds (generally through ActBlue/the DNC) and also sometimes but less often to state and national candidates. I have a separate shopping/donations email address set up, but I still hate the emails from random senate candidates from states far from me. Unsubscribing from emails and stopping texts get me off of the lists for those campaigns but doesn't stop the influx. I could filter the emails (that's a good idea), but I don't want to only allow texts from my contacts list, which is the suggestion in those news articles.

I just dug around the ActBlue website and found some contact info. Maybe I can get off the list. Ugh.
posted by bluedaisy at 3:17 PM on July 2

> I managed to reach someone at the primary email / text service for one major US party

> I just dug around the ActBlue website

I'm also receiving multiple daily SMSs after donating to ActBlue last cycle, so if anyone comes up with details (links) for how to get off the ride, please share the steps.
posted by soylent00FF00 at 4:05 PM on July 2 [2 favorites]

If you go to the main ActBlue donation page, you'll see at the bottom this text:
By providing your phone number you consent to receive recurring and/or automated text messages and calls from Biden for President and the DNC

I also found this somewhere in the terms of service or privacy policy: [e-mail]

That's who I emailed. No word back yet.
posted by bluedaisy at 4:21 PM on July 2 [2 favorites]

Nthing text filters. I use Bouncer on my phone and have been happy with it. It takes a bit of time and application to set up a new filter for each instance, but it eventually gets nearly all of them and so is totally worth the time to me. It's also very satisfying to open the Junk folder and see umpteen unwanted messages sitting there that I didn't have to deal with.

For email from the DNC and candidates, I changed my address in their records to a throwaway account that I rarely look at, and that was pretty effective. (I wondered if they might just use both old and new addresses, but they didn't.)
posted by Short Attention Sp at 5:18 AM on July 3

If you have an iPhone, go to Messages settings and click Unknown & Spam which will take you to message filtering. When you turn on Filter Unknown Senders you can then select an SMS Filtering (I have ActiveArmor through AT&T as my service provider). You will not receive notifications for any messages marked as Junk by the filter. It also sets up like a folder system for your messages where they are grouped into All Messages, Known Senders, Unknown Senders, Unread Messages, Transactions, Promotions, and Junk.

I just learned about this and turned it on today so I can’t personally speak to how effective it is against political texts but it’s worth a shot.

I also changed my ActBlue email to a throwaway email.
posted by misskaz at 5:55 AM on July 3 [1 favorite]

I have no proof, but I've been swiping left on unread political texts (on iPhone) to "Delete and Mark Junk". I fear opening them to respond "STOP" validates my phone number somehow and leads to more spam.
posted by Twicketface at 3:35 PM on July 3