Why Blue State Digital just joined my global kill file

If you are active online in liberal politics, you’ve probably received email from a company called Blue State Digital, even if you didn’t realize it. Blue State Digital is a digital advocacy platform used almost exclusively by liberal organizations and candidates.

If you get email from Democratic candidates, a lot of it comes from Blue State Digital. If you make donations to Democratic candidates and liberal organizations, they are often processed by Blue State Digital. There are a few such platforms used by liberal candidates and causes, but Blue State Digital is one of the biggest, if not the biggest.

Unfortunately, Blue State Digital has a terrible, self-serving attitude about what constitutes spam, an attitude which very few other reputable email marketing service providers agree with, and rightly so. In particular, Blue State Digital allows list swaps, which means in a nutshell that as far as they’re concerned, any candidate or organization using their platform can beg, borrow, or steal a mailing list from any other candidate or organization willing to give it to them, and then upload all the addresses in that list into their Blue State Digital account and start emailing them, even though none of the people on that list have opted in to receiving emails from them.

I’ve been putting up with this for years, which means often, suddenly, out of the blue receiving emails from liberal candidates and organizations I’ve had no prior contact with and would never have any reason to have contact with, sent via Blue State Digital.

Well, I’ve finally had enough of my time being wasted by this. As of today, I will be automatically reporting any email I receive via Blue State Digital as spam.

If you’re a liberal organization or candidate looking for a digital advocacy platform, I’d like to make two suggestions:

1. Don’t do list swaps, i.e., don’t email people whom you haven’t had prior contact with. It’s just not OK.
2. Don’t use Blue State Digital. At least, not if you want me and people like me who hate spam to receive your emails.