Political.email: Holding Campaigns Accountable, One Inbox at a Time

This is a submission for the Postmark Challenge: Inbox Innovators.

What I Built

political.email is a civic watchdog platform that empowers voters to monitor the fundraising and messaging tactics of political campaigns — in real time. It builds on research by colleague's at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, Mathur et al. 2023, which showed that 42% of fundraising emails contain deceptive manipulation patterns.

Every user gets an inbox like [e-mail] they can use when signing up for campaign newsletters or donation appeals. Behind the scenes, political.email logs incoming messages, analyzes them for manipulative patterns (e.g., fake deadlines, shaming language, false scarcity), and contributes anonymized insights to a public dashboard that keeps campaigns honest.

Most importantly: This is not a honeypot. We don’t rely on decoy accounts or shadow scraping. Instead, political.email seeks to become the address that users actually use to interact with political campaigns. That makes it harder for senders to sanitize or evade detection — and turns real users into a powerful, decentralized accountability network.

political.email is destined to be a special-purpose email proxy to help enhance the relationship that small donors have with political campaigns which — no matter what their affiliation or ideology — tend to fleece small donors with not reciprocal sharing, in what has become an appalling development of democracy.

---

Demo

🧪 The prototype is in private beta.

If you're interested in testing, reach out for credentials or a demo walkthrough.

(Or check out our core engine at Mailbase, which powers this project.)

📸 Screenshots (forthcoming):

• User dashboard showing latest received messages
• Campaign-level transparency summary
• Manipulation pattern detector results

---

Code Repository

Private GitHub (currently closed source).

Source code will be made available if the project is selected as a finalist.

Judges may request read-only access for evaluation.

---

How It Works

• When users create an inbox (e.g., [e-mail]), they can sign up for political mailing lists without using their real email.
• Incoming messages are forwarded (if desired), and also scanned for patterns known to be emotionally manipulative or misleading.
• The platform aggregates anonymized statistics about:
  • Which campaigns use what tactics
  • How frequently
  • Over what time periods

We hope this provides transparency without surveillance — empowering journalists, researchers, and voters alike.

---

Why This Matters

Recent research (e.g., Mathur et al., 2023) has shown that manipulative tactics in political email are not only common — they’re the norm.

But those studies are retrospective snapshots, not ongoing feedback loops.

Political.email changes that.

• It provides real-time visibility into how political actors behave.
• It gives users agency to participate in that visibility without compromising their inbox.
• It creates pressure on campaigns to behave better — because now they know someone’s watching.

⚖️ This is not about shaming. It's about sunlight.

Campaigns that run clean fundraising operations deserve credit.

Political.email can highlight that too.

---

Powered by Mailbase + Postmark

This project is a fork of Mailbase, a secure inbound email backend designed to be forked into projects like this one.

Postmark's Inbound Email API made this entire pipeline possible:

• Each user gets their own Postmark-routed address
• Inbound emails hit a webhook
• We filter, store, optionally forward, and run analysis tasks
• No Gmail API required. No IMAP. No drama.

By giving users narrowly scoped addresses instead of blanket inbox access, Postmark enables fine-grained, trust-first workflows — exactly what a project like this needs.

---

Roadmap

✅ Live:

• Inboxes for real users
• Forwarding logic + Postmark webhook
• Secure storage & delete flows

🔜 Coming:

• Manipulation classifier (language pattern detection)
• Campaign summaries & dashboards
• Searchable public archive
• API for researchers and journalists

---

Final Thoughts

We need better transparency in political communications — especially online.

Political.email helps deliver that, one message at a time.

If selected as a finalist, I’ll open-source the full project, including:

• Live dashboards
• Embedded manipulation pattern libraries
• Opt-in public campaign archive

Thank you to the Postmark and DEV teams for creating this challenge.

Your API made it not only possible, but ethical to build something like this.

Comments

[Jamey]

Nice posting! Looking forward to talking to you