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Google gets the green light to flood US Gmail inboxes with political spam
- quantified 4y agoJust give me a UI button to add my own spam filter rule.
- mattzito 4y agoThere is- you can add filters that will route emails directly to spam based on the criteria you define
- kencausey 4y agoI 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.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> 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.
- zindlerb 4y agoI 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.
- quantified 4y agoThat's not one button. Google can provide the button.
- chmod775 4y agoConsidering 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?
- mattzito 4y agoWhat do you see as polarizing/editorializing instead of factual reporting in that article?
- chmod775 4y agoStarts 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.
- throwuxiytayq 4y agoI 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)
- chmod775 4y ago> 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.
- vlod 4y agoMaybe 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?
- user00012-ab 4y agowhen you get an email from someone on the list, randomly forward it to another person on the list.
- egberts1 4y agoAll the more reasons to delete my gmail account. It was crappy, snoopy, and in-secured, to be honest.
- user00012-ab 4y agoReply to all political spam with: "This message has been marked as spam by Google and has been automatically deleted."
- jqpabc123 4y agoThanks Google for proving once again that anything with your label on it is best avoided with no further consideration needed.
- slater 4y agoI'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.
- user00012-ab 4y agoWhat about just charging $X per email sent, and if the other person doesn't mark it as spam you get your $X back.
- arcastroe 4y agoHow long would it sit in Escrow? What if the receiver never checks their email?
- user00012-ab 4y ago$0.50 so it doesn't matter unless you spam a bunch of people.