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Two things are attached to every message automatically, from the sender identity rather than the campaign, so they cannot be forgotten on a particular send. If your template does not already include them, they are appended for you rather than sent without: A physical mailing address. CAN-SPAM requires a valid postal address in every commercial message. It lives on the sender identity. A paid-for-by disclaimer. Political email carries the same attribution expectations as other political communication. Set the disclaimer text on the sender identity, and mark whether the message is authorized by the candidate. If you edit a sender identity in a way that removes a required physical address or disclaimer, the identity is paused rather than allowed to keep sending. The write succeeds and sending stops, which is the safe direction: a paused identity is a problem you notice, while non-compliant mail is one you find out about later. Requirements vary by jurisdiction and by whether the sender is a candidate committee, a party committee, or an independent group. We supply the mechanism; confirm the exact wording with your counsel or compliance advisor.

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Unsubscribes

Every message carries a working unsubscribe, in two forms: One-click unsubscribe. The RFC 8058 List-Unsubscribe headers are on every message, so the mailbox provider’s own unsubscribe button works. This is now a Gmail and Yahoo bulk-sender requirement, not an optional nicety. A recipient who uses it is suppressed immediately, with no confirmation page and no chance to mail them again. A hosted preferences page. The footer link opens a page where the recipient can unsubscribe and give a reason. Unsubscribes are honored synchronously. There is no batch window during which a recipient who just opted out can still receive a queued message. A provider retrying a one-click POST does not produce a second unsubscribe event: the deduplication key is the message, and a recipient unsubscribes from one send exactly once.

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Suppression scopes

An unsubscribe applies at the scope the recipient chose or the scope of the message they acted on, which is why suppressions exist at three levels: organization, sender identity, and list. See Bounces, complaints, and suppressions.

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Authentication

Three mechanisms prove your mail is really yours, and all three are set up by the DNS records you publish when you add a domain: Together these satisfy the bulk-sender requirements Gmail and Yahoo enforce. Your standing against each requirement is on the sender requirements scorecard; see Campaigns and deliverability and Sending domains and DNS.

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Gmail’s Verified Sender Program

Gmail runs a program that can show a verified indicator beside messages from participating senders. Political senders generally qualify through Campaign Verify, the same authorization used for 10DLC texting. Two things to know:
  • Campaign Verify accepts committee sending domains for the program from September 8, 2026. We prepare the submission with you (eligibility from your existing Campaign Verify record, the exact sending address, and the pre-checks Google requires); the one step that has to happen in Campaign Verify’s own portal is yours.
  • Google publishes no automated status feed for it, so the status shown on your sender identity is recorded by our team rather than fetched. If you are enrolled and it is not reflected, tell support.
  • It is never a condition of sending. It affects how a message may be displayed, not whether it is delivered. A sender with no Verified Sender status sends exactly as well as one with it.

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Forget this address

A deletion request is different from an unsubscribe. Unsubscribing keeps the row so it can keep blocking mail; forgetting erases the address itself. Forget this address is a support-assisted operation, and it works in a specific order that is worth understanding:
  1. A platform-wide suppression is written first, holding the address so it stays blocked permanently. This happens before anything is erased, so there is no window in which the address is both forgotten and mailable.
  2. Then the address is erased everywhere else. In records that must survive for accounting and reporting, such as sent messages and click records, the address is replaced with a one-way hash. In list membership, contact profiles, and validation caches, the row is deleted outright. Anything still queued to send is skipped.
The replacement is a one-way digest, so the address cannot be recovered from it. This is irreversible.

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The donation page URL and {donate_url}

Set a Donation page URL once, in Email settings, and every donate button that does not already link somewhere more specific uses it. A template can reference it directly with the {donate_url} tag; Lincoln also falls back to it when it drafts a donate button and you have not given it a URL of its own. If a template uses {donate_url} and no donation page URL is set, the checklist and test sends refuse the campaign rather than sending a button that links nowhere. Campaigns that link out to a WinRed or Anedot donation page get their links tagged automatically, so the committee can attribute the gift in their own WinRed or Anedot portal. Political Comms does not track or report donation amounts: fundraising totals live in the committee’s donation platform, not here. Each campaign gets a refcode: e- followed by eight characters. When a donation link points at WinRed or Anedot, we append, without ever overwriting a parameter you set yourself: UTM parameters are added when append_utm is on. If you already put a refcode on a link, yours wins. From there, attribution happens entirely inside WinRed or Anedot: they match the refcode, source code, and UTM parameters against the gift and report it in their own dashboard. Political Comms hands off the tagging and stops there.