Comment by schneems | Hacker News Reader

Comment by schneems | Hacker News Reader

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I would probably pay a thousand dollars if you could get NPG Van, Action Network, and Act Blue to never text or email me again.

I’ve aggressively replied STOP and “delete and report spam” and unsubscribing from all communication for literally years and they keep coming. I’ve emailed action network several times and they:

1) Claim they don’t have the capability of putting me on a global “do not contact” list. (Just because they refuse to build such a feature doesn’t mean it is impossible to build)

2) Claim it’s their clients that are emailing and texting me, not them (but they control the infrastructure, and allow their clients to add me to campaigns I’ve not opted into and they’ve not verified my participation)

3) Cannot give me any contact information about the people directly messaging me because that would “violate trust” (literal lol, their business model is founded on trust violation)

Anyway. I have given up all other hope. I get multiple texts a week, sometimes multiple a day. It’s very disruptive to my life and there’s nothing I can do to meaningfully stop it.

Any tips? Any advice? I’m kind of desperate. I want to donate money again, but I also want to not be constantly digitally harassed.

Yeah, definitely do not donate money to Democrats (or Republicans, I assume), at least not with any real contact info whatsoever, as they will spam and worse, sell your info forever. Even still I still get occasional random requests like “I’m Mike Bobson, and I’m running for state assembly, 4th district in South Carolina.” Like, wtf, no I’m not going to fund literally every race in the country.

I did find a way to get NGP VAN to F off though!

From the email response I got from them:

> … If instead, you would rather not receive email from any of our customers, we can offer to add your email address to our "blocklist." This will prevent an email sent by our customers, using our email product, from being delivered to you. This will not completely eliminate our customers' ability to email you, and it will not delete your data from their systems. For instance, if our customer uses another system to send bulk email, then our “blocklist” would not stop them from emailing you through that system. Please note this is an all or nothing approach – we do not have the ability to apply the “blocklist” to individual customers using our email tool. If your email address is added to the “blocklist” you will not receive communications from any of our customers using our platform.

Then there was a link which unfortunately seems to have my email embedded in it so I can’t share it directly.

I started this process via making a request on yourdigitalrights.org. Best of luck and lmk if I can be of any help.

The fact that you donated money to politicians is a disgrace already.

Amen, you should leave donating to corporations instead.

I think every PAC is legally required to list its officer(s) in their public incorporation documents. I tracked down the officer for one spamming me and publicly asked the guy (on Twitter I think) along with a screen-cap of the email to remove me from their lists. I never heard back, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been harassed. It might have to hit their doorstep…

I got this response from a member of the Permission Slip team:

“this has definitely come up in discussions. Non-profits were initially exempt from complying with data requests, but are set to kick in. We’re keeping a close eye on it.”

> Act Blue to never text or email me again.

I have been tearing my hair out over the Act Blue spam. I would crawl naked across hot coals to make it stop.

I set up a monthly task in Todoist to remind me to check this Action Network URL which shows every list you've been added to and lets you unsubscribe:

https://actionnetwork.org/subscriptions

...but as of this month, it's a 404. Great. Edit: False alarm! You have to be logged in.

I have the number of mail rules for the stuff like this. While you can do this in any client, I also keep thunderbird client open constantly on one of my media servers because it provides some features other rule machine engines do not, like an option to block by any header. I successfully blocked legitimate spam that way, the one that was somehow passing gmail. This works perfectly.

Another way is to use throw away email address per subscriber. You can for example use mailcare :)

Change your phone number, and block their email netblock at the mailserver.

I change my phone number every 90 days, it de-links tracking like this. Your phone number is like your primary key for data brokers these days.

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