Political Email Harassment

[imoldernu]

So I may have political leanings, but I have purposely avoided signing on to any political website, and avoid commitments like the plague.
The only thing I've done in the past year that even touches politics per se, was to write to both a Republican and a Democrat representative about a local issue that bothered me.

Now... I get an average of 6 to 8 emails per day from all kinds of organizations, politicians and people that I've never heard of, asking for money.

Am I alone?

I am cursed.

 

[Walt34]

This is why spam filters were invented. If the E-mail client you're using doesn't have one your ISP's web site almost certainly does so the spam can be deleted before it reaches your inbox.

 

[MRG]

Yes spam filters work well. Some organizations sent/sell your contact info to other related(in their mind) organizations. Many have an opt out check box, surprisingly they seem to be very difficult to find.

 

[ziggy29]

And sometimes you don't even have to respond to any politically-related groups -- it can be what you buy. If you buy organic coffee or ammunition, it obviously makes political mailers want to assume something about you, even if those assumptions may be false.

 

[Walt34]

And sometimes, like getting sick, there is no known reason as to how your E-mail address got "out there". I'd had one address for years I used exclusively for shopping and knew that eventually it would find it's way to the spammers. They got around the filter by using a different address every time and I tried filtering by subject and other sorts of things. Eventually I gave up, deleted that account, and began using a different one.

 

[urn2bfree]

spam filter works great if I,check my email account on my desktop but if i check my email on my iPad all the spam shows up....what do I have to do to stop this?..


Sent from my iPad using Early Retirement Forum

 

[MichaelB]

Gmail has an indicator that lets you designate a note as spam. Doing this improves the spam filtering - if you use Gmail.

 

[scrabbler1]

I wouldn't call it harrassment per se, but once I began donating $50 to my local congresswoman's re-election coffer every 2 years, I got on some list so that I get solicitations from her party or related groups to donate all the time. Some of these were from primary candidates in House and Senate races across the country! For example, I live in New York but I got solicitation letters from candidates in Michigan and North Carolina. Those all went straight into the trash.

 

[easysurfer]

+1 about the spam filters. Got one built-in with my email reader and after some "teaching" of marking what is spam and what is not, the filter works I'd say over 95% of the time.