Prepare your inbox, Gmail's awful political spam experiment starts now | Hacker News Reader

Prepare your inbox, Gmail's awful political spam experiment starts now

androidpolice.com

49 pointsfreediver15 comments

Will be exciting to see in the next week[0] whether Gmail delivers my much-desired overseas absentee ballot to my Inbox, Spam, or drops it altogether, because Texas is too lazy[1] to use a properly-configured mail domain, or any form of domain for the web link to the ballot generator - that IP address link naturally looks sketchy as hell to the spam catching algorithm.

[0] If you applied for an overseas absentee ballot, and your state emails them, you should see it by Saturday - aka, 45 days before the election. If they mail them... eh, who knows, but they're supposed to be with USPS by Saturday, as well.

[1] Whether the laziness is unintentional or not is a different matter. They're very proactive about dropping registrations.

Here's an idea: if politicians want to get past the spam filter, why not try being less spammy? How about not sharing my email with every other politician in the same party when I donate to you once? How about not using the Unicode mathematical bold characters in your subject line? How about not sending me 3 emails per week? These things go straight to spam because they are spam.

In the US, if you donate over $200 the donation is public record. That record can be associated with any number of marketing databases to figure out how to get in contact with you. Also, politicians trade lists sometimes - that's a thing too.

You'd prefer that the rules of the scheme forbid address sharing, right? You're in luck: They do. Also you have to click explicitly that you want the mail from each particular campaign, and if 5% of people report a campaign's mail as spam, that campaign loses access to the scheme. (For a week the first time.)

But inventive unicode is allowed.

All I know is that I donate $15 to some race one time using a unique email address and then get all kinds of spam at that email address from other politicians I've never heard of. Something is fishy there.

That would get those other politicians booted from the gmail scheme. ("Would" rather than "will" because so far, noone has signed up. The thing starts officially in a few days.)

Annoying for users, but a sensible bit of legal judo given the current anti-tech political climate. This is undoubtedly better than congress mandating spam-filter exemptions for politicians.

It's absolutely great - sounds like they'll even categorize the emails for you with an unsubscribe button.

If I mark it as spam will emails from that sender be treated as spam going forward? Is there any personalization to the spam filters or does it all feed into some global AI?

As far as I'm aware, they use some sort of global data for spam blocking, but certain bulk senders are exempt from being marked spam. For instance, I had to create a Paypal account for some purchase, and I marked everything they send me as spam, but there's no way Google will consider their emails to be spam for everyone else by default, even if I got 1000 people to do the same thing. But I'm sure if I got 1000 people to mark some rando as spam, they'd be in a much more precarious situation.

Disclaimer: I worked for Google but never anything related to this.

What alternatives do people recommend?

Am thinking of buying a domain and pointing it at fastmail or protonmail, so that I can change providers more easily in the future. A deluge of spam will likely be the necessary shove I need.

I built an inbox around AWS SES with unlimited inbound and outbound addresses.

Works by creating buckets inside my inbox for each inbound email address.

Deliverability isn’t an issue since it’s built on aws which enforces all the usual prerequisites.

Spam hasn’t been a problem (I think) because I require all emails to come over TLS. Don’t think spammers are going to set up SSL just to spam from some DO instance.

Works well. Not super polished but it’s “my” inbox and I’m insanely proud of it.

I've been using Migadu without trouble. I used Protonmail before, but I didn't like the hoops I had to jump through if I wanted to use POP3/IMAP. They do have a bridge daemon thing where you can sign into protonmail and it exposes POP3/IMAP locally but it's not available for phone OSes. I could set up a VPN or something, but that's more hoops than I wanted to jump through.

Thankfully Google deactivated my ancient, Gmail Beta era Gmail account for reasons they won't explain, and have made it impossible for me to log back in. So I won't have to endure this.

Thought experiment: Replace G with hot

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