How We Solved Jimmy Kimmel’s Political Campaign Spam Problem

This is the privacy tool you need to escape campaign email overload and other email spam

The 2024 U.S. political season in the books. 😮‍💨

For any of our U.S. readers who made political donations this cycle, you undoubtably received hundreds of texts and emails begging for money. Towards the end of October, we were getting dozens a day. It was crazy. Readers in swing states must of received 2-3x the amount.

With the election over, the texts and emails have mostly stopped for us. But apparently not for everyone.

Welcome to another issue of Secrets of Privacy where we discuss internet privacy related topics and provide practical tips to immediately enhance your privacy.

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Late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel recently singled out the Kamala Harris campaign for sending fundraising emails—even after her election loss. He did an entire bit on the situation that you can watch here, but here’s the punchline from our privacy POV:

“This is the part when you realize that once a candidate has your email address, they will never stop contacting you.”

Kimmel isn’t wrong.

Once your email lands in the hands of a political campaign the emails are hard to stop. Even if you opt out of a campaign’s email list, they inevitably sell your email to other political campaigns and friendly organizations. This opens the floodgates to even more spam. If you make the mistake of giving out your primary email address, you may have to consider abandoning the account - the volume can become overwhelming.

But there’s a simple, privacy-friendly solution to this problem.