Gmail will spare political campaign emails from spam filter

Brace yourselves because more email Spam is coming. As a result of questions, concerns, and accusations regarding bias in the way Gmail’s spam filtering works, particularly as it pertains to political campaign emails in the U.S., Google began back in June to plan on mitigating this. This was solidified with a move to ask the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to green-light a pilot program to keep campaign emails from ending up in Gmail’s spam folder.

This move was met with much backlash from the public, who took to the FEC’s website to express how much they hated the idea. People don’t want more spam to flood their inboxes, especially when political campaigns are already flooding their snail mailboxes, text messages, and phone lines. However, Google has now received approval to proceed with the pilot.

The program entails allowing the first email from “authorized candidate committees, political party committees and leadership political action committees registered with the FEC” to get through the spam filter but displaying a prominent notification asking the user whether to allow subsequent messages from that sender or opt-out. The user can opt-out at either the receipt of the first message or any message after that by marking it as spam, at which point, any future emails from that sender will be sent to the spam folder. Additionally, a requirement will be in place for the sender to provide a “one-click unsubscribe” in their emails.

This will cause extra work and annoyance for Gmail users, who will now have to field and curate emails from an unknown number of candidates that wish to reach out. In a statement to 9to5Google, a Google Spokesperson said:

We appreciate the FEC’s speedy review of our request and we will reflect on the positive and negative feedback received during the public comment period. Our goal during this pilot program is to assess alternative ways of addressing concerns from bulk senders, while giving users clear controls over their inboxes to minimize unwanted email. We will continue to monitor feedback as the pilot rolls out to ensure it is meeting its goals.

We will have to wait and see how this test will impact Gmail users’ inboxes and whether this pilot program will stick. I understand Google’s position in this matter since it most likely didn’t want the company or its tools to be used as a political talking point. However, users like you and I will be affected by this decision — we just don’t know how much yet.