Comments in the story Democratic voters say Democratic fundraising spam is backfiring prompted me to provide these email tips.
Rules
Most email clients allow you to add “rules” or “filters” that automatically process every received email. If you can identify unwanted emails you can create a rule to send them to trash unread or to move them from your inbox to an unobtrusive folder. The process is similar across clients. Most allow creating a rule based on the currently selected message, which is easier, and all allow creating and managing rules independent of any particular message. Here’s how to access the rules:
- Apple Mail: Mail > Settings > Rules
- emClient: Menu > Rules
- Gmail: Click the abacus icon in the search bar
- Mailbird: Menu (hamburger icon) > Settings > Filters
- Microsoft Mail: Setup via outlook.com
- Microsoft Outlook: File > Manage Rules & Alerts
- Outlook.com: Settings (gear icon) > View all Outlook settings > Mail > Rules
- Thunderbird: Tools > Message Filters
- Yahoo: Settings (gear icon) > More Settings… > Filters
Each client does things a little differently but the gist is:
- Create a new rule and name it (the name is only for your convenience)
- Choose criteria to match messages
- List actions to run on messages that match the criteria
You can also change the order that rules are applied. Each email will be checked against each rule in order until there are no more or a matching rule has an action that says stop checking rules. (Some clients will stop at the first matching rule.)
You’ll probably want to match the sender (but see below) and send the email to the trash or spam folders or to a previously created folder meant to hold these messages or even delete them immediately. Usually you can also mark the messages read.
Aliases and Subaddressing
Do you have just one email address? Do you have more than one but use your primary address when donating? You might consider creating a new email address or an alias just for donations.
Creating a new email address is easy: just create a new account at your preferred email provider. Set up that account to forward messages to your primary address where you can filter based on your new email address as the receiver. Then use the new email address when donating.
Gmail and some other providers allow you to set up aliases. On gmail these are trivial: simply insert dots (.) somewhere in your existing address. So janedoe@gmail.com can be aliased as jane.doe@gmail.com, j.a.n.e.d.o.e@gmail.com, etc. There’s no need to set anything up — gmail ignores the dots before the @ as far as delivering emails to your account. However, filters can check for the dots when matching the receiver. Other providers usually require you to register an alias which will be an entirely different address but will automatically deliver to your account.
Gmail and some other providers also allow you to use “subaddressing”. This is when you add a +name or -name suffix to your user name. For example, janedoe+donate@gmail.com would deliver to janedoe@gmail.com. On gmail there’s no setup for this, you just add the suffix and filter based on it.
Note that a new email address or an alias that you register (i.e. neither the dots of gmail nor subaddressing) gives you more privacy. It’s trivial for email harvesters to strip dots and suffixes to get your primary email address.
Selling Addresses
As mentioned in the story linked above DailyKos and ActBlue don’t sell your email address but ActBlue does share your email address and phone number with whatever groups you donate to. If you get spam from other groups it’s because the groups you donated to shared your email address and/or phone number.
With email you can use aliases and subaddressing to detect and discard the spam. You could even use it to find out which groups sold you out — simply provide a different alias or subaddress to each group and see where it ends up. Personally, I’ve been curious but never bothered to do it.
If you get phone spam all I can suggest is don’t give them your phone number and reply to unwanted texts with “STOP” (without the quotes).
I hope this info helps someone. If you have other tips please share in the comments.