For months I received near-daily emails from Mayor London Breed’s reelection campaign, delivered to my personal Gmail account. I try to keep that inbox free of anything related to work, and I no longer live and vote in San Francisco. So, when I received the first one back in July, I unsubscribed — or I thought I did. The emails kept coming, with increasing frequency, and as I clicked “unsubscribe” at the top of each one obsessively, I began to feel like I was losing control. Why couldn’t I get off this email list? How could I set work boundaries if every time I opened my Gmail I’d see the mayor’s latest campaign update? Paranoia set in: Was I being resubscribed as fast as I was unsubscribing? Was this personal?
It wasn’t. It turns out I was using the wrong unsubscribe link: The correct one, that does actually work, was at the bottom of the email, not the top. But I wasn’t the only one to make this mistake; many of my friends expressed similar frustration at receiving a never-ending slew of emails from her campaign despite efforts to quell their flow.
This fall, setting boundaries between election updates and our daily lives has become nearly impossible. My snafu with Breed’s emails is nothing compared to the horror stories I’ve heard from friends, some of whom receive upwards of a dozen campaign-related phone calls and texts a day from local candidates or even from campaigns in states they haven’t lived in for years. Block one number calling incessantly, and a new one will pop up. Sign up for updates from a local candidate you support, and all of a sudden, you’ll receive texts........