Google gets the green light to flood US Gmail inboxes with political spam | Hacker News Reader

Google gets the green light to flood US Gmail inboxes with political spam

theregister.com

28 pointssamizdis21 comments

Maybe someone will create a group list of all email addresses of political candidates that do this.

Then we can forward ALL email (even from all other candidates) to this group list saying "Not interested thanks"

Technically it's not spam according to the FEC. Maybe it will help them rethink it's effectiveness?

when you get an email from someone on the list, randomly forward it to another person on the list.

I've had this dumb idea banging about in my head for a while: A pay-for e-mail service, working just like any other e-mail service (IMAP, POP3, etc.), except you can only e-mail (send AND receive) other folks on the same service.

Then, if companies do want to reach folks on this e-mail service, monetize it by forcing companies (for $$$) to use ONE address (on the same service, obvs) to reach the other folks on said service.

E.g. if you're the GOP and you want to reach jane@magical-email-service.com, you'll be sending e-mails ONLY from gop@magical-email-service.com, which in turn allows Jane to easily filter out the trash (instead of the e-mail coming from trump2024@, trump2030@, voteplz@, campaign-ohio-8827727-test-funnel@, etc.)

I have not thought this fantastic idea through.

What about just charging $X per email sent, and if the other person doesn't mark it as spam you get your $X back.

How long would it sit in Escrow? What if the receiver never checks their email?

$0.50 so it doesn't matter unless you spam a bunch of people.

Just give me a UI button to add my own spam filter rule.

There is- you can add filters that will route emails directly to spam based on the criteria you define

I agree, but I'm hard pressed to come up with the appropriate criteria at least in advance of getting any real life examples. At the moment, I can't think of anything better than 'republican|democrat' but I bet that will generate both false positives and false negatives.

That said, I doubt that I have to be concerned about it as I'm pretty unknown in political circles, other than having signed up for vote.org years ago.

I setup a filter to archive any email with the phrase "paid for by" this has been pretty good at filtering all political spam. Although it may generate some false positives.

> I'm hard pressed to come up with the appropriate criteria at least in advance of getting any real life examples

A wide filter would be “ActBlue” and “WinRed.” Otherwise, every jurisdiction has copypasta boilerplate in its political emails. Find yours and filter.

That's not one button. Google can provide the button.

All the more reasons to delete my gmail account.

It was crappy, snoopy, and in-secured, to be honest.

Reply to all political spam with:

"This message has been marked as spam by Google and has been automatically deleted."

Considering that e-mail is essentially an utility at this point, this doesn't surprise me.

In many countries it's considered vital to democracy that political campaign ads be privileged. I don't think the US are any different?

Also from an outside perspective, the portrayal of the republican party in this article is again... eyebrow raising. Nice editorializing though. I guess polarization is still the main goal of political reporting?

Yep. Language like that is par for the course now...

Recently more and more people caught on to the fact that for (most of) us, inflammatory language generates interests which translates to clicks.

It's not about what you are saying but how you are presenting the argument.

Thoughts no longer compete on the vector of 'truth', but on a new vector of 'stickiness' - where diction and presentation are significantly focused on in the pursuit of profit...

Just like news journalists before us intended... /s

In America: political mail is the greatest offender in this regard - information designed to be digested quickly, easily, and build 'trigger words' in their constituents... in traditional mail it's the biggest waste of paper (from the hand to the trash for a half a glance)... with email you get politicians with corporates backed finances running amok with targeted advertising.

This is a future hell-scape of further political division and money flooded into the waiting mouths of advertisement agencies. This is not a pro-human decision - thanks to our current political landscape... This may be more appropriate with healthier and more stable democracies.

What do you see as polarizing/editorializing instead of factual reporting in that article?

Starts with the title: "Google gets the green light to flood US Gmail inboxes with political spam" instead of something like "Google gets green light to exempt campaign mail from spam filters".

Then almost the whole article is dedicated to the best arguments of the opposition, while cherry picking a single proponent argument and presenting it in the worst possible light. The only time a non-opponent gets a proper quote is when Google is justifying having a pilot program - and they're more of a neutral party here.

I think that's quite honest reporting given both the volume of emails that will be sent, and how unwelcome they will mostly be. (I mean, I'm not American, so I won't be getting those, but I know which folder they'd be going to if I were)

> I think that's quite honest reporting given both the volume of emails that will be sent, and how unwelcome they will mostly be.

I prefer factual and un-opinionated over "quite honest". Where I come from the former is considered the proper way to report on politics. Anything else smells wrong.

Thanks Google for proving once again that anything with your label on it is best avoided with no further consideration needed.

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