i find i am unsubscribing from all the political-figure mailing lists my #ActBlue-ing over the years has put me on.
i'm not sure whether this is the right thing or the wrong thing to do. it is an act of sheer #revulsion.
@interfluidity I doubt it will help. Those lists aren't sourced ethically. I donated to one or two Florida candidates and I was inundated last cycle with state candidates across the country begging for money. It never ends and they don't ever seem to respect the anti-spam acts they themselves passed.
@LouisIngenthron look on the bright side!
we can have the satisfaction of unsubscribing from the same lists over and over and over again.
@interfluidity Fwiw, I don't ever click unsubscribe links. As often as not, they just confirm your email/phone number is real and add you to a dozen other lists. Instead, I simply block and report.
@LouisIngenthron (to whom do you report miscreant mailing lists?)
@interfluidity For texts, you can typically report it to your carrier. For example, on AT&T, you can forward spam to 7726. Some phones (I've seen it for sure in Samsung ones) have spam protection built in and allow you to block & report a source directly from its contact record. Those that don't have it built-in can benefit from 3rd party apps.
Email, being a bit more decentralized, is a bit harder to punish the bad actors. But, you can report spam to your email provider. Gmail's user-report-based anti-spam, in particular, is fantastic, but even small organizational email servers have a vested interest in increasing the signal-to-noise ratio.
If you're feeling really salty, you can even report them to the FTC for violation of the CAN-SPAM Act, but that requires you to have requested removal at least once. If you click unsubscribe and they still mail you, though? Report 'em to the feds.
@LouisIngenthron (i'll have to do some record keeping! for now i just bank the unsubscribe button like a reinforcement-trained rat.)