Friendly fire - how Dem spam killed my donations

I'm a good commie. Each cycle we  give some money to help Dems.

Not this election though. Partly, that's because my team's spam has gone astronomical. The spam flow is legal though, because "political speech" isn't covered by the CAN-SPAM act of 2003.

Campaign spam comes with 'unsubscribe' links, but they don't seem to be connected to anything. Even if they were, however, I'd probably be re-enrolled with the next list update. I doubt the campaigns spend much on mailing list hygiene.

At least the email headers aren't faked, so I have about thirty Gmail filters that send all email from all identified campaign-related domains to the trash. I'm probably not the only one doing this though, because lately the domain names are proliferating. The speech spammers are trying to get around my filters.

This is a job for the DFL. Yes, it's a bit of a reach for them -- but we're talking money. Money talk gets politician's attention. Here's what the DFL can do:

1. Get serious about a state wide unsubscribe service. Tell campaigns that if they don't follow the rules, they don't get funding or DFL support.
2. Forget about reaching me by email. There's nothing a politician can put in a mass email that will interest me (the vast majority of political speech is aimed at the undecideds). Instead set up narrowcast feeds aimed at literate geeks whose vote is not in doubt.
3. Enjoy the money Emily and I will send after the spam stops.