Google will no longer protect political emails from Gmail’s spam filters

Google recently decided to end a pilot program that may have given registered political campaigns a special privilege. The test, which began in 2022, was Google’s response to a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee (RNC). While the RNC doesn’t seem to have changed its mind on the matter, Google has decided to end the program — a decision that could be welcomed by regular users.


According to Aetna and quoted by SlashGear, the story began when the RNC filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California. The lawsuit alleged that Google identified some of the emails sent by the RNC as spam because of their political affiliation.

The complaints may stem from the party’s online fundraising efforts, which had relatively disappointing results in the summer of 2022. To back up that claim, the GOP cited a study released by North Carolina State University that found 77 percent of right-wing political emails were sent directly to spam on Gmail, while only 10 percent of left-leaning emails received the same treatment. . But Google rejected this claim and cited the spam filter system as one of the reasons for Gmail’s popularity.

The RNC filed the complaint in October 2022, and Google quickly responded, questioning the data found in the study. According to the company, Gmail’s spam filter relies on other things that are completely unrelated to political affiliation. The criteria of this filter include the number of times emails are sent and how users interact with them.
After all, most of us receive dozens of spam emails every week (and maybe daily), and the algorithm used by Gmail learns how to handle these emails.


This lawsuit against Google was finally rejected by the court. And of course, before that, Google had started a pilot program, with the participation of more than 100 political committees, to prevent political emails from being spammed, and interestingly, the RNC did not participate in this plan, a program that was finally terminated by Google’s decision.