Google moves to keep campaign email out of spam

[rcjordan]

https://www.axios.com/2022/06/27/google-campaign-email-spam-gmail

[ergophobe]

Gmail was more likely to mark Republican fundraising emails as spam during the 2020 campaign, compared to Outlook and Yahoo

Is that the important question? Maybe the problem is that Yahoo has worse spam filters. Based on the number of extreme right emails that end up in my Yahoo spam catcher account, that is my sense.

It seems to me the most important questions are:

- do users want this?

- does Republican mail get filtered more often than Democratic mail?

- if so, why? Is it because it has more incendiary language, in which case the filter is correct, or is it filtering based on words that merely map to conservative positions but do not advocate, say, hanging the Vice President, in which case the filter is wrong

As an occasional donor to campaigns it then becomes a full-time job to get off all those fucking lists. I am grateful for every one that Google puts in spam.

As an aside, I was thinking yesterday that in general the liberals mostly email me and the conservatives mostly call me on the phone. It's not a perfect division but at least 80/20 in both cases. I much prefer the email because it seems easier to get off those lists.

I wonder if that's just me and my profile with the two parties or because of where they put their efforts.

Most recently, calls from Republicans are very human-sounding robots. If you ask if it is a robot, it says, "I am a real person using a computer to assist me with this call." 

I've been enjoying doing my little Turing tests. If you ask them things like "Would you be offended if I said I think you are an asshole for disturbing my dinner," they don't handle that gracefully. Their linguistic processing for profanity is substandard.

I long ago found that with most commercial services, if they have labyrinthine phone trees that do not make it easy to get to a human agent, if you simply say, "Fuck you," it will often shortcut you right to "Let me get someone to help you." The Republican phone bots need to up their game to this level.

[ergophobe]

In clicked through to the original Acios report and it says, much more precisely,

"New research shows Gmail was substantially more likely to mark Republican fundraising emails as spam during the heat of the 2020 campaign, while Yahoo and Outlook disproportionately flagged Democratic ones."

That's interesting. As I say, the right wing emails that come through on my Yahoo account are often very spammy and the left wing emails that come through on my Gmail are spammy in waves (like now as a result of SCOTUS decisions).

In both cases though, it is the huge quantity of mail that gets through that is the problem. Thankfully Google puts 100% of them in Promotions.