Senator Grassley to lead GOP effort demanding Google remove Gmail spam filtering

Agree, but I don’t think anyone has proposed that in those broad terms.

I think Google’s proposal was to somehow exempt political campaigns from email spam filtering (good luck preventing spammers from exploiting this back door).

But ultimately the elected officials who are complaining about GMail don’t seem to understand the gravity of how their proposed changes would cause collateral damage and ripple effects. Better to move slow on any new regulations here.

I’m not convinced GMail spam rules are purposely set up to do this. It’s easy enough for the users to not want this content. And I personally was somehow single-opted into government+politics from 7 states away and can’t manage to unsubscribe (despite using the tools that both Gmail and the sending vendor have). As a user it is incredibly frustrating and I will lash out in any way I can.

Also worth pointing out that Republicans aren’t crying that Yahoo! Mail spam filtering seems to bias towards R and away from D. They don’t care about “fair” or “even playing field”. They want whatever benefits them and conveniently ignore the issues that bias to their benefit.

Additionally, Google has already proposed a fix, which is to exempt political campaigns from email filtering (good luck on actual spammers not exploiting this) and to have the FEC (a small, under resourced government oversight department whose board is always political) somehow weigh in whenever there is a controversy.

Better to build a system communication channel outside of email/SMS for this purpose.

So Senator Grassley believes porn spam will free the USA's libido and he's doing his part to encourage a sexual revolution? </sarcasm>

The outright alignment with criminal elements by the GOP is becoming severe. State Treasurers are punishing banks that don't promote coal despite the economics not working (since when do Treasurers get to decide which businesses win or lose?), state legislatures are making health decisions without being doctors, candidates are running on a platform of promising to alter votes, misogyny and white supremacy are being embraced. Is the FBI investigating any of this? I get the distinct impression that rule of law is breaking down.

Worth pointing out that you can actually go to the USPS and request that messages from specific senders not make it into your inbox.

What should probably happen is email providers find a way to easily add sender exemptions to spam filtering on a per user basis. I believe GMail does this for senders in your contact list.

This entire controversy is about GMail reducing friction for their average user, but this causes somewhat more friction for some Republican campaign supporter users who don’t know how to use GMail tools.