Political Email to Bypass Spam Filters and Go Directly to Your Inbox? | Hacker News Reader

Political Email to Bypass Spam Filters and Go Directly to Your Inbox?

isipp.com

45 pointssdoering70 comments

Title of the original article: "Do You Want Political Email to Bypass Spam Filters and Go Directly to Your Inbox? Congress Does."

It says Congress, but looking at the submitted bills, there's only 1 party involved in the authoring and sponsoring of said bills. I'll let you guess which one it is.

I will personally DENY list (Vote against, FOREVER) any candidate that sends me email I haven't asked for, which isn't related to an emergency or direct benefit I am entitled to (looking out for my interests).

It is irrelevant. Once anybody is elected to congress they become part of a society which fraternizes together, schemes together, colludes together, and looks out for each other. It's one big party with engineered fake differences to keep commoners bickering. Congressmen and congresswomen don't represent you or your interests any more than necessary to get reelected. Candidates burn unspeakable amounts of money to get their face in front of the public to get elected. And even if they get voted out for enacting unfavorable policies there are zero consequences and their close buddies are elected instead. You can only vote for members of the same family. They may be affiliated with one or the other party but it's fundamentally just one family. One society that anybody is allowed to pull candidates from in practice. Outsiders will almost NEVER be elected. If they are, the mistake is quickly corrected with a character assassination (Trump) by the Intelligence Community, which works very closely with The Family. This money comes from special interest groups which willingly burn that money to stay in power. Once in power, the elected ones kick back favors to the same special interest groups that allowed them to ascend to power (again, by allowing candidates and incumbents to burn cash to put the candidate's name and face everywhere). Most people only vote for familiar names, faces, those who they are told to vote for by their pastor or other organization, or along party lines. It is a miracle this country still functions.

>It says Congress, but looking at the submitted bills, there's only 1 party involved in the authoring and sponsoring of said bills.

This seems like a nitpick to me. Most non-trivial pieces of legislation gets passed along partisan lines (for instance[1]), yet we still say that "congress" passed it. Same goes with congress failing to pass some piece of legislation.

[1] https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2021267

This is true, however R's are not in control of the House or Senate at the moment. Lack of D co-sponsors gives me no reason to believe that Congress currently wishes to support this (for now). Maybe this fall, things will be different.

Democratic donations are rising and Republicans are declining sharply [1]. I see no benefit for Dems to support this bill and giving Republicans an opportunity to better access their base (or widen it).

[1] https://twitter.com/ShaneGoldmacher/status/15519178832986439...

The bill has a long term effect that would benefit both parties , the change in donations is a short term event

Let's be cynical here: They never care about the long term if it affects their next election.

> Most non-trivial pieces of legislation gets passed along partisan lines

That reinforces, rather than minimizes, the argument that it is inaccurate and deeply dishonest to characterize the content of a bill whose sponsorship is solely among the party in the minority in both Houses as what “Congress wants”.

Bipartisan bills are often cosponsored. Right now the bill is by a republican, if a Democrat has declared support or the party has in general declares support you can mention it then. When voted on you can display the results

We vote for people based on what they support saying "polticans" for this seems like a way to hide what is obviously a shit bill

This seems like a predictable reaction from a party that has observed how casually tech and media companies are willing to cancel or censure their content and point of view. Once the boundaries are crossed, it’s difficult to uncross them.

For those that don't want to click the article and feel both parties are just as likely to support such a bill, the answer is Republicans.

Both parties send spam email, but across all of my inboxes since I first got on the internet in '95, Republican candidates spam the most and are the most misleading in the content of those spam messages.

I won't speculate why. It's just something I have observed.

My observation is the opposite, I actually very very rarely get anything from Republicans, but non stop garbage from Democrats.

Even if one party objectively spams more than others, personal observation could be biased by (a) how your email address has been passed around and (b) subjective assessment of what constitutes “spam”.

There was once a study that "proved" Democrats were smarter because could recognize the letter W faster than Republicans. This was back during the George "W" Bush period. Basically one group was enraged at the sight of a W, so they were quick to spot it.

Same experience.

Dems seem to not pass emails around as much from my limited experience, giving their messaging possibly less exposure to spam filter training. I'm on Democrat and Republican mailing lists for various candidates, and for the last 4 years I've been getting people trying to sell me MAGA hats and the like. I'm still on IJR's mailing list despite never signing up for it. I have like 3 other tangential publications that are along the same messaging that last year were sending me like 4 emails per day.

Never had Dem merchandise or tangential publications land in my inbox before, and I'm on a couple congresspeople's mailing lists, and have given my email address to state and national Dem organizations.

I feel like for a very long time, the Right has been the most vocal about personal pride, "law and order," being an upstanding citizen, etc., but at the same time it's the Left that's still hamstringing themselves by trying to apply these ideals to politics.

I thought this was just a US thing, but then I saw the same shit happening during the brexit fiasco. I don't understand it, honestly.

I’m slightly surprised the proposed wording contains this exception: “…unless the owner or user of the account took action to apply such a label.”

I have taken action - I signed up for an email service that includes automated spam filtering.

“If you mail a letter, you expect it to be delivered,” said a “red-faced” Grassley, as one person recalled. “That’s what should happen!”

Someone should arrange for Mr. Grassley's phone to receive one copy of every Republican fund-raising message.

It does get delivered (barring technical mishaps). How I sort my mail is my concern.

That's not true on a technical level, most spam gets blocked long before it reaches you. Only some of the spam actually shows up in your spam folder.

So if he wants to compare emails to traditional mail, I suppose he would support a law that gives your email as strong privacy guarantees as normal mail gets, right??

Why stop there? Arrange for email from all political campaigns, including Democrats and whatever minor parties exist.

For extra fun, it's possible to read the text as preventing the email service from applying users' requested filters to political campaign email. (It's not clear that setting up a filter to automatically apply labels qualifies as "took action to apply such a label.")

This is blatantly unconstitutional--it's almost directly a parallel to the amendment to TCPA that exempted debt collection calls that was struck down as unconstitutional just two years ago in https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/19-631_2d93.pdf.

I always wondered about the logic here. They purport to be reputable but use phone number randomizers and shifting domains. If they don't want to be treated as spam then they should act professionally which leaves the decisions to the users directly.

Yeah, exactly this. They don't want to leave the decision to the users. They want you to see their message, whether you want to or not.

Spam is as spam does. This is spam.

IME they aren't using phone number randomizers, they're using autodialer services that end up using "random" phone numbers. Same as 2FA SMSs often come from "random" numbers, they're just from a bank of numbers controlled by the SMS service being used.

(Not saying it isn't spam, just commenting on this particular tactic.)

I guess this begs the question: could a business take advantage of this loophole by running a perennial candidate for local dogcatcher or some other minor elected position?

Someone like Washington's "Mike the Mover", perhaps? He spent over twenty years running for various offices... never got many votes, but his campaign statements in the ballot pamphlets sure did create some name recognition.

I’m not shilling for “Hey” but preventing this type of spam is the primary selling point of the service. All email should be deny by default. Not some, all. Only explicitly allowed senders should make it to my inbox, and only I should be in charge of managing those explicitly allowed senders.

Grassley’s confusion between email and physical mail is just another reason why we need age caps for holding office. Grassley is 88. We’re approaching gerontocracy territory with people like this in charge. No one over 70 should be allowed to hold public office. If you’re running for Senate you should age out of eligibility on your 64th birthday. 68 for the House, and 66 for Presidency.

> “It shall be unlawful for an operator of an email service to use a filtering algorithm to apply a label to an email sent to an email account from a political campaign unless the owner or user of the account took action to apply such a label.”

I mean this seems incredibly easy to circumvent, right? If Google is going to implement this, I guess they'll need a list of email addresses they aren't allowed to filter. Forward that along to the users and then give them a button for "block everything on this list." In fact integration of this sort of thing could be a nice selling point for using the Gmail app rather than your phone's built-in one.

IANAL - but what if GMail applies no label to the offending e-mails, but merely sorts them into your "Legally Mandated Political Spam" folder? Or just silently deletes them...unless you checked that tiny little "I want political spam in my Inbox" option (light gray text, 1 point font) that is buried was 2/3 of the way down in the long T&C's that Google recently asked you to click "I agree" to?

I suspect if we dig into it, we'll find that they consider things like shunting the emails off into an alternate inbox to be "labeling" in some sense. (I mean it is vague, right?)

This is why I suggested just providing the list to the user, and then asking them what to do client-side. It is easy to write laws telling Google what to do on their servers... limiting their ability to provide options that users can activate locally on their client seems more difficult.

Skimming over this...is there anything on how it would be implemented?

GMail and other providers would need up-to-date, verified whitelist details on ALL the political campaigns. Which campaigns might quickly find themselves under heavy attack by spammers - eager to get control of as many "whitelawed" email accounts as they could. And of course the whitelisting technology would have to be implemented (correctly and fairly quickly) not just by GMail, Hotmail, & Co. - but by zillions of small ISP's, schools, and such.

And who all does the "an operator of an email service" apply to? Few corporations will want spam from political campaigns delivered to their employees, especially if that means bypassing anti-phishing filters and other security...

How do you apply the DO_NOT_FILTER label :(

The house bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/8160

The most interesting bit on the record is the introduction of the senate bill.

https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/volume-168/iss... (pdf version at https://www.congress.gov/117/crec/2022/06/15/168/102/CREC-20...)

My favorite part:

  I do not believe that Big Tech should be deciding what information 
  individuals receive. Americans are free to opt out of whatever email 
  communications they wish, including political communications, but Big 
  Tech should not be making that decision for them. My Political BIAS 
  Emails Act would prohibit email services from using filtering 
  algorithms on emails sent from political campaigns where the candidate 
  is running from Federal office.

But nowhere is the ability to opt out specifically codified. I'd love to see that penalized or even criminalized, but doubt that those who would be impacted by the cost of that would choose to bear it.

Instead they choose to shift the burden to the ~45,000+ businesses that have >500 people. If this costs $1000 per company, then this is a $45 million dollar burden on the American people.

For a party that seems to be clear on being strong on limited regulation of business activities, this seems very much like a regulation that would be burdensome on many.

Interesting timing. I received 3 political text messages over the past week, each of them I reported as junk, but I would get the next one - not sure from the same number or a different number.

Proposed legislation typically doesn't work that well as an HN post/topic:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

That doesn't mean you should dissuade posters. This issue is very serious.

HN's remit is not 'everything someone thinks is serious', there are zillions of very serious issues for which HN is not a great place. The problems with proposed legislation posts are covered in the moderation comments I linked. They aren't about whether the issues proposed legislation tries to address are serious or not.

It's a tech related political matter. Extremely tech related, and misguided based on assumptions about tech. You may think it is irrelevant but the average tech professional I am very sure does think it is relevant.

It's a proposed-bill post which is a poor fit for HN which, in turn, is why it's no longer on the front page. I did not say anything about it being 'irrelevant' or 'the average tech professional'. Again, this is explained in the linked moderation comments.

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did. [1]

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is just my personal preference but the first time a political email gets past my custom spam filters, I will most certainly move domains I configured on fastmail back to my VPS nodes and they would not get another penny. Being an AU based company I hope they do not play this game.

Then there are Trump's email campaigns, with spammy subject lines.[1] "Reset your password" and "Your shipment order", along with "Final Notice" and "Payment Reminder". Of course those are treated as spam.

[1] https://gizmodo.com/donald-trump-fundraising-emails-250-mill...

It's amazing the lies about Trump people believe. You can post almost any blatant false thing and people will eat it up. In fact a typical routine is to post a story on on some horrible thing he said. Get the masses riled up. Then quietly retract the story later. Rinse and Repeat.

There is already talk about making the next candidate the worst person imaginable, whomever he his.

The person you replied to provided verifiable evidence of the claim that they made. Where is the lie here?

I'll just curate a list of known spammers, er sorry, politicians on github. We can then make a community inbox filter rule, and boom, problem solved.

i feel like this kind of regulatory chicanery is a straw too far for the camels back. google and other email providers already do the lions share of the work to make email intrusive and arbitrarily cancellable.

we've had threads on it before, and even a docker stack of tools to make it easy as cake, but I personally think its time to begin an orderly evacuation from the centralized megacorp email provider.

how will this influence people to vote for the candidate.

I see contempt for my personal choices of what message im going to listen to; and im expected to vote for that in office.

When people are pestered by someone actually taking measures to defeat a curtailage, it doesnt make a positive impression; Why would anyone vote for that.

Most people don’t have the technical context that you do. Most will just see an email in their inbox and read it.

Look in your Gmail spam folder sometime.

Then consider this: this spam is sent, continually, even in this day and age, because someone somewhere does fall for it.

It's the same reason telemarketers still exist despite the vitriol you'll hear from here and many other places - there are still some people somewhere who will buy something from a cold call.

I could never imagine myself buying or voting for something in response to an unsolicited phone call or email - at this point it just seems like common sense to me.

But I guess there are people out there that are really sad or angry to the point where if something makes them feel better about the world, they'll give things more trust than they should. I think it could happen to anyone, really.

I'm no longer sure that someone falls for spam emails. The entire populace gets spam and hates it.

The spammer population has narrowed to the 200 worst sociopaths in the world. I believe they are spamming while losing money because of their pathology.

Spam featuring political wording also coming to your mailbox!

Spammers are sociopaths that will stop at nothing to get stupid ads into your email box.

So if this goes through my political campaign "Problems in Bed? Vote Ted Cruz to affirm your right to buy ED treatment from edpharmacy24.com now" would be illegal to mark as spam? No way this could backfire.

Probably not, because the wording is “from a political campaign”.

Of course, unless it comes with a trusted official “do forward spam” registry, it could jeopardize all anti-spam efforts.

What is required to qualify as a political campaign? I assume worst case I can always have someone run for some office on the platform of "make sure everyone can continue to access effective ED treatment on edpharmacy24.com" and campaign for them? After all affiliation with a major party can't be a requirement, that would be too undemocratic.

> What is required to qualify as a political campaign?

The text of the law has a definition, but it looks like it ks basically a legal, FEC regulated candidate or state or national party campaign committee.

> I assume worst case I can always have someone run for some office on the platform of "make sure everyone can continue to access effective ED treatment on edpharmacy24.com" and campaign for them?

I suspect if you are edpharmacy24.com, doing that would be an effective way to game this bill, while likely running into enough problems with a bunch of existing campaign finance rules, without the kind of shroud of plausible deniability people even skirting those rules prefer to maintain.

The definition given is "The term ``political campaign'' includes-- [a list follows]", and my understanding of the canons of construction indicates that this means that the term is not to be understood to be a fully enumerated list in the definition: anything on the list would constitute a "political campaign", but something not on the list could also still constitute a "political campaign."

It only costs a few thousand to "run for office". Anyone can do it. People already abuse this for advertising and even just memes. https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/udw7ca/w...

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/8160...

The easiest to trigger would be:

>(C) a connected organization (as such term is defined in section 301(7) of such Act);

which references:

>(7) The term "connected organization" means any organization which is not a political committee but which directly or indirectly establishes, administers or financially supports a political committee.

So with $1 donated to some PAC, you organization is now legally a political campaign.

Wonder how exactly that would work. Are most email sent directly by the campaigns? I assume PACs and SuperPACs do most of that kind of stuff, because they have more bribe money, err, donations, and so better resources.

Users could still add political senders to a personal block list, right? It seems very sensible to say that emails that are from the prevailing legal authority should not be filtered as spam (i.e. digital junk mail) by default.

> It seems very sensible to say that emails that are from the prevailing legal authority should not be filtered

Yeah maybe, but that's not what this bill is saying. A political campaign is in no way a legal authority, let alone prevailing.

"Political campaign" here is not "anyone who says they are political" - it's the official campaign organizations for candidates who are registered in an election. They're legitimate actors within the electoral system.

Officially registered candidates already get a lot of info about voters by law - including telephone numbers and addresses. This seems well in line with that.

Edit: I was wrong - this does have a disgustingly wide definition of "political campaign". I do think it would be good to ban spam filters catching official campaign literature, but that's not what is being proposed.

In my experience, political senders change their originating email address (and phone numbers for SMS solicitations) quite often. New ones for each new campaign, making them very difficult to block. I made the mistake of giving my info to Bernie's campaign in 2016 and have been plagued by intermittent ActBlue spam ever since.

There is at least the appearance of bias in these algorithms, with Google being a rather extreme example. It’s not easily explained away by other factors. Study showed a smaller bias towards the right for Yahoo/Outlook.

I wouldn’t be too surprised if a number of Dems support this bill for the same reason.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.16743.pdf

> We further observe that Gmail marks a significantly higher percentage (67.6%) of emails from the right as spam compared to the emails from left (just 8.2%).

Google is getting very blatant in their biases. I'm learning about topics more quickly from what has been "fact checked" and proven "false".

Highly Orwellian

Reply on news.ycombinator.com