Gmail is now officially allowed to spam-proof politicians’ emails | Hacker News Reader

Gmail is now officially allowed to spam-proof politicians’ emails

theverge.com

39 pointsfooey32 comments

I just want to be able to sign up for a do-not-message SMS list and a do-not-spam email list, specifically for political candidates.

The past year in particular I've been getting as much as daily political fundraising SMS's but every time it's from somebody new. Random representatives from across the country. I reply "STOP" each time and that same one never messages me again, but there are literally thousands and thousands and thousands of people running for state legislatures out there...

I'm fine with Google exempting political e-mails from other commercial spam, AS LONG AS there's a setting to send them straight into the trash.

And I say this as someone who's very politically active -- but there's nothing democratically enabling about getting messages from random reps in Wyoming, Hawaii, Idaho, Virginia, none of which are places I live or can vote in.

I went back to the dumb approach of setting up keyword filters (SpamHound on iOS, which allows a Regex-similar pattern).

You’d be surprised at how much spam gets blocked by a simple “http.*” filter. Of course, I occasionally do miss messages but it’s pretty easy to check the spam folder when I’m expecting a 2FA code or something. Known contacts are never blocked so it’s never really that much of an issue.

Check out the message contents you’re receiving. I bet you’ll find a similar pattern, maybe “(vote|election).*” would suffice.

I rely on never giving out the same email address twice. Every form gets a new variant.

So if one starts blowing up with spam, it's easy to filter that out, and to know exactly who is responsible.

Is there an easy way to achieve this? I remember there being one, but the details are hazy.

Buy a domain and setup a wildcard catch all. Instructions vary by platform

Edit, duckduckgo and other services offer this as well.

I have been getting slammed with political sms messages. Had no idea such a filtering program existed

Don't forget the increasing trend of sending the politicians photo so that it shows up in your notifications.

Related from last week:

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32349079

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/04/republica...

Have they planned for “false flag” spam campaigns by political opponents, “unsubscribe” links that take weeks to process (if ever), and other forms of abuse?

Unrelated, it would be nice if joining the program would require making mailing list checkboxes default to “opt out” instead of “opt in”. Then the mails would only go to people who explicitly requested them.

My natural question is how is it going to be administered technically and how can it be abused? Because as far as I understand this is a first in such a broad "exception", not banks or health institutuions have such an exception with Gmail.

Is it going to be based on SPF? DKIM? Are they gonna whitelist special IPs? What if a politician uses mailchimp? Is it going to be from .gov domains? Email delivery is famously hard to such an exception may lead to some abuse. Of course Google has a lot of engineering capacity but I can imagine a situation where a politician is offered a deal by some newsletter agency to give up access to email get-out-of-jail-free card given by google for a donation to their campaign by said agency.

> “It’s sad that instead of simply stopping sending spam emails, Republicans engaged in a bad-faith pressure campaign — and it’s even more unfortunate that Google bought it,” Daniel Wessel, DNC deputy communications director, told The Verge in June.

The problem is that what google (or whoever) classifies as spam, and what is actually spam from the perspective of the user, are two different things. You could send a highly desired email to a single person, and have it marked as spam because the IP address you got auto assigned spammed people in the past.

So I think the idea here is that google will just never treat them as spam, because they actually aren't spam(at least, in the manner that penis enlargement pill emails are).

You can just unsubscribe if you don't want to receive them, I think? Do campaigns send unsolicited emails? I assume they would need to gather your consent by signing up for a mailing list somewhere before they start messaging you.

> Do campaigns send unsolicited emails?

Yes, they absolutely do. It's not even rare.

I guess I never noticed it before because it goes directly to my spam!

Are we on a path where politicians legislate themselves special privileges past our spam filters?

CAN-SPAM already explicitly exempted political emails

I dislike that so much. They're always the ones that are allowed to be bad it seems?

Say it ain’t so!

Do as we say, not as we do! What’s new?

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/do-not-call-registry

"There are some exemptions to the Do Not Call rules. Because of the limits to FTC’s authority, the Registry does not apply to political calls"

The DNC list is government-run, though. GMail's spam filter is not. The FTC's limit doesn't enter into it.

Okay Google, we need to talk. I am thankful for you to show your true colors.

I am done with you. Thanks for providing me with the last straw I needed to cut ties. Who needs Google Workspace when Google (ab)uses us users as leverage for gaining influence in the political arena.

I expect a spam filter I am paying for to not create wholes in it for the highest bidder or gaining political klout.

I don't want Google to start allowing spam, but it feels unfair to blame Google for this. There is not many companies that would take the heat that comes from pissing off a entire political party by blocking their fundraising efforts. If they didn't have this program then they would have legislation forcing them to have this program. Republicans are not going to lay down and accept being cut off from marketing.

I don't know if this exact solution is the correct one, but political campaigning is special as it is a fundamental part of democracy. So it does make sense to give it special treatment. Everything needs to be logical and explainable, rather than a mysterious black box.

You know, you can just not use gmail. Solves a lot of problems.

I have my email address publicly listed not only on my website but on my HN profile, and I still have a far better signal-to-noise ratio on my @marginalia.nu address than I do in my gmail address.

It’s somehow gotten a lot better for me too in the last few months, I now don’t even get spam on the WHOIS emails

Generally, to me, more intrusive a candidate, whether that's by email, phone, or SMS, I would be a lot less likely to vote for them going forward.

Personally I'm bit intrigued how these messages are leading to successful fundraising...

Is Google the only provider doing this so far? Has anyone created a git repo that tracks which mail providers are permitting governments to side-step spam filters?

I'm so glad I don't use GMail! I get to be in control of my own spam filter.

quick look around on internet suggests it is still possible to bounce emails back to sender

e.g.

https://www.wikihow.com/Bounce-Emails

That's content-farm rubbish trying to drive downloads.

Are they doing anything to make sure children aren't getting this junk? I think we're supposed to like, "think of the children", or something? Perhaps it does not apply when there is money to be made.

How long until this is (ab)used to peddle crypto?

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