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Google IT Technology

Google Moves To Keep Campaign Messages Out of Spam (axios.com) 138

Google has asked the Federal Election Commission to green light a program that could keep campaign emails from ending up in spam folders, according to a filing obtained by Axios. From a report: Google has come under fire that its algorithms unfairly target conservative content across its services, and that its Gmail service filters more Republican fundraising and campaign emails to spam. Republican leadership introduced a bill this month that would require platforms to share how their filtering techniques work and make it illegal to put campaign emails into spam unless a user asks. Google's pilot program, per the June 21 filing, would be for "authorized candidate committees, political party committees and leadership political action committees registered with the FEC." It would make campaign emails from such groups exempt from spam detection as long as they don't violate Gmail's policies around phishing, malware or illegal content. Instead, when users would receive an email from a campaign for the first time, they would get a âoeprominentâ notification asking if they want to keep receiving them, and would still have the ability to opt out of subsequent emails.
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Google Moves To Keep Campaign Messages Out of Spam

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  • Ask the recipient. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Z00L00K ( 682162 ) on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @01:02PM (#62657430) Homepage Journal

    Ask the recipient if they think it's spam. Don't make decisions either way.

    If a campaign message falls in the spam filter then it's probably a bad message anyway.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @01:09PM (#62657454)

      I get messages from both parties, they're *all* spam but only the DNC ones made it to my gmail inbox. I have no idea how I got on any of their lists.

      I wrote custom filters to send them to trash.

      I didn't see any obvious difference in the email headers, e.g. it doesn't look like it's a DKIM thing.

      I have other emails that I've specifically exempted from spam that they keep trying to send there, too, though. These were charity emails that I actually want. Go figure.

      • I have other emails that I've specifically exempted from spam that they keep trying to send there, too, though. These were charity emails that I actually want. Go figure.

        In this case I'd guess it's a misconfigured combination of MX, SPF, DKIM and/or DMARC settings, or sometimes bad formatting (white text on white background, plain text contents distinct from HTML-formatted content, tiny font sizes etc., all of which are typical spam behavior). I've had opportunity to contact charities and businesses about their emails landing in the Spam folder no matter what, and it invariably involved some of these being incorrectly configured in the way typical spam is incorrect. Alas, m

        • Even among organizations that ought to know better(ie. if you can afford safeforce can you not afford even a quick consult with someone who knows what SPF is?), hiring a 3rd party mail-delivery entity and then screwing up the configuration sufficiently that any email they pay the 3rd part to send is, architecturally, an unsophisticated spoof of their own domain seems to be something of a hobby. I assume that it's worse than that among genuinely hapless mom n' pop do-gooders.
          • unsophisticated spoof of their own domain

            Yep. So far this hasn't really impacted those who should care because it's invisible. They know their e-mails are ending up on spam folders, but at best they think this is just e-mail providers being mean and uncooperative. Since the stick to beat spam isn't working well for these clueless cases, Google and other major e-mail providers are trying to carrot things so even the less knowledgeable will want to have it working right in the form of the BIMI [bimigroup.org] standard, which is basically having their logos prominen

    • Agreed.

      I don't want any side being given unfair or preferential treatment.

      I also don't want to receive campaign emails (or snail mail or door knocks or phone calls or text messages or communications of any kind) from campaigners regardless of political affiliation. Let the users control their preferences and be done with it.

      • I don't want any side being given unfair or preferential treatment.

        Remind me again which party just took a giant dump on 50 years of established legal precedent? Which party said businesses have a first amendment right, unless that business happens to publicity criticize a homophobic law?

        Fair and balanced is fine so long as both sides play fair. When one side insists on playing Calvinball, they deserve to be put into time-out.

    • by jonadab ( 583620 )
      If it's sent in bulk to tens of thousands of recipients who didn't sign up to receive it, it's spam, period. If anything, political spam is MORE annoying than commercial spam.

      Now, legit campaign newsletters being sent in bulk to people who have signed up for them, that's different. They should have their precedence set to bulk (by the sender, preferably), but they're not spam because they're not unsolicited. That's like when your pharmacy's automated system sends you an SMS alert to let you know your pre
    • by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @01:42PM (#62657602) Journal
      That's an easy, and superficially neutral-sounding, suggestion to make; but it doesn't work so well under real world constraints:

      'Ask the recipient' basically implies 'give the spammer at least one successful delivery; regardless of how much feedback you have from other sources and other user responses that it's probably garbage.

      Demanding a carve-out for "authorized candidate committees, political party committees and leadership political action committees registered with the FEC" also seems like it's just begging to have every alleged-nonprofit banging down the door and demanding the same right to send mail so spammy a machine dislikes it just because they are registered Good Guys(just look how well a political exemption worked for the Do Not Call list...)

      Perhaps this is just the bitter mailserver admin in me; but I also suspect that there would be a lot of random fly-by-night PACs that have filled out FEC paperwork; but haven't bothered to do even rudimentary SPF/DMARC/etc. config for whatever 3rd party consultancy their nephew is being paid to operate as a way of skimming money off who will then whine like babies when email from spamlutions.biz with forged origin addresses gets blocked because Google should have somehow intuited that that email was their FEC-blessed email, despite patrioticfundraising.scam not listing spamlutions.biz in their SPF records.

      All that said, I'm 100% in favor of email providers letting their customers see every last scrap that comes in for themselves if they want to, and do their own sorting and evaluation if they wish; but forbidding default settings where a lot of spam gets scrubbed without direct user intervention would essentially be handing email to spammers by force of law.
    • I have the same problem with press releases; they are trying to sell me ideas, and the language they use kick in the spam filters. My problem is that as a journalist I want certain kinds of press releases but not others, and Google is not very good at figuring out what ones I want. Commercial advertising selling products does get through, probably because Google does not want to block their advertisers.
    • Fortunately they're presenting a prompt for you to put them back into spam if you want, but I don't like this goes against Google's previous policy: if lots of people are marking a message as spam, it gets treated as spam for everyone.
  • Spam is where all of those damned things belong.
  • No, let's not. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @01:18PM (#62657488)
    Let's not do this. While we're at it can we get the campaign robocalls added to the blocklist as well. You're entitled to your speech, but you aren't entitled to my attention.
    • I suggest keeping an air horn close by and blowing it in the phone when you receive an unsolicited phone call, hopefully the fuckers will go deaf.

      • by tsqr ( 808554 )
        Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of political phone calls are recorded messages; they don't care about air horns.
  • The GOP campaign emails of the last 6 years or so have DEFINED spam. Lies, "campaign contribution" grifting, incitement, insanely marked up campaign merch, etc. etc. If literally anything meets the definition of spam, they are it. As someone above said, let the recipient decide if it's spam, if the recipient thinks that it's spam and doesn't want to see it, reaching them with another message isn't going to change their mind.
  • Oh God No. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AndyMan! ( 31066 ) <chicagoandy&gmail,com> on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @01:19PM (#62657508)

    Google, MORE political spam filtering please, not less.

    • Email was only ever designed for personal messaging. Anything other than a directly whitelisted email address is spam.

  • Get ready for a flood of crap gmail that you cannot easily block. Running your own email and filtering for the win.

  • who cares send it straight to the trash either way.

  • Fine, but automatically drop all such emails unless the user opts in to receive campaign emails.

    It's not like any of these groups bother to filter their lists. They don't care if they email thousands of foreigners, people from outside their constituency, etc. I received at least two emails from campaigns in NY during the primary cycle, I haven't lived there in more than 10 years. My email address also wasn't associated with my voter registration there (wasn't collected at the time) and I'm not registered an
  • Here I was thinking that spam is already pretty obnoxious, but now the penis pill ads are including political messages too?

    Take a pill to enjoy super long erections and vote for...

    Yeah, that'd be annoying, but after reading TFS for a bit of clarification, it seems this is about making sure political ads don't get spamfoldered. Ugh. I think I'd rather have the penis pill ads.

  • This isn't really about email or messages. The problem goes much deeper.

    As I see it, the political situation here has been reduced to "Team Red" versus "Team Blue" because both sides have done so much gerrymandering and rigging the system that it's all but impossible for anyone to get on the ballot without support from one side or the other.

    As a result, nobody from either side can be seen to cooperate with the other for fear of alienating their base and being replaced with someone who will toe the Party Li

  • by devslash0 ( 4203435 ) on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @02:30PM (#62657732)

    I hate politics with all my passion. Whenever I receive any political leaflets, emails or other newsletters I see red. Luckily, political parties are public bodies. Every time I receive any political crap myself, I go and find out who's in charge of the sender organisation. Then, I start forwarding any unwanted correspondence to the top-most member of the organisation with a "PLEASE STOP" message (although the actual message is different and more brutal). Most places stop after a few weeks and/or iterations.

  • by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @02:46PM (#62657768)
    The official campaign period in the UK is 25 working days, or roughly five weeks. A ban on political advertising on commercial television and radio and strict campaign spending limits. Typical campaigning in the US is well over 500 days for President. I simply don't care after a few weeks of this bullshit. I tune out and hit the junk button if an email even slightly smells political. The US campaign system is broke ... just the way the politicians want it.
    • Yup. As a Brit Iâ(TM)d say your laws concerning political funding are in dire need of tightening⦠but from here it doesnâ(TM)t seem like you actually have any. Donâ(TM)t even get me started on that filibuster bollocks.
      • Everyone here knows it's borked and unless something is done to fix this mess it's going to get very ugly until it implodes. Ugly won't even begin to describe the chaos after that. The US is headed down a very dangerous and destructive path. The media is helping to grow the huge divisions we see all in the sake of profits and sensationalism. It's already an ugly mix, only to get worse. The rest of the world needs to take notice. If the US goes full-on Xi, Kim, or Putin it will be disastrous for the rest of
  • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @03:04PM (#62657822)

    Actual headline:"Google's spamfilter is broken"

  • Just as a point of reference; becoming FEC-registered is really, really easy [fec.gov]. I don't think that there's even a fee involved, if so it's something really perfunctory.

    The registration forms do presume some amount of organization exists in order to be registering; but things like treasurers and designated agents are roles that can fairly easily be filled by a small number of people for a large number of nominally independent organizations, especially when the whole point is for the organization to largely
    • You are correct in that it's free.

      The registration also comes with a whole bunch of rules about where the money comes from and what you can do with it. If you didn't raise much money, you could probably fly under the wire, but you do have to report ALL the income and there are a whole slew of reporters and political organizations taking apart everything in that FEC database.

  • The FEC should regulate the spam by making the sender include a mandatory disclaimer. Then we could craft a rule to auto forward the message to our representative, then delete it.

  • Republican leadership introduced a bill this month that would require platforms to share how their filtering techniques work and make it illegal to put campaign emails into spam unless a user asks.

    I hope the law includes a sub-clause that the subject line MUST contain the words "republican electoral campaign" so I can easily filter it.

    I'm not holding my breath though.

  • Doesn't really matter how much or little I might hate political campaign advertising. The fact is, you can't really have a Democratic Republic without letting the parties on the ballot have opportunities to reach out to the public and try to win their votes.

    If a decision is made that email is simply an inappropriate vehicle for campaigning? Then it could be outlawed completely. Otherwise, I think services like Google should leave it alone by default, delivering it to the intended recipients in all cases exc

    • They aren't trying to win votes. They are trying to raise money. Don't believe me? Have you ever seen one the doesn't have a send money link?

      The issues they promote in the e-mails have nothing to do with what they will do or what they believe. They are all about getting your money.

  • by spitzak ( 4019 ) on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @04:30PM (#62658004) Homepage

    All that will happen is *all* spam will start being disguised to look like campaign emails.

    If Google was not filtering Democrats only then all spam would be disguised to look like Democrat campaign emails.

    Neither of these situations are wanted. That stuff is spam. I can sign up with an organization if I want to see email from them.

  • There's a reason we mark them ALL as spam.
  • We don't need any of it. If they really want to help the public, send links to some tutorial on how to use duckduckgo/google/etc. to find out information. And more links that teach people how to get 3+ legit resources to fact check a single topic. Etc.

  • If someone says "let's check if your accounting is clean" and your first response is to write a whole new set of accounting rules, I'm going to do with "guilty for 1000 Chuck."

  • You have chosen to subscribe to an email service that will happily open and read your messages before you're even get to see them. So you have proven to be obviously unable to make reasonable decisions. Why not allow Google to sort your mail? You'd probably be better off if Google even voted for you. I know, thinking is hard. Have a candy...
  • This might be the better option
  • Unbelieveable.

    I have to opt out to not receive SPAM from a "political party"?

    How retarded is that?

    A mail which comes not from a guy I'm acquainted to, or a guy who has a strong reason to assume I would want to communicate with him: is spam I want it in my spam folder.

    A clear indication for spam is: if it is mailed to millions of users of the same mail service, it is SPAM That is the base definition of *spam*

    • It already legal for them to send it. There is required boilerplate at the end of the e-mail, but as long as that is there, they can send it. Same with telemarketing calls and now telemarketing text messages.

  • I wonder how useful it would be to use the domain in the unsubscribe link to filter spam?

  • A few years back, I donated to a politician's campaign. Now I get a shit-ton of emails from random politicians I cannot vote for anyhow, begging for money. As far as I can tell, the emails are written by coked-up 8th graders who just discovered that you can change fonts in text. Though given the grammar and spelling used, maybe 8th graders is giving them the benefit of the doubt. The emails often are addressed to my email address, but with someone else's name, so obviously someone is making money off of

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