this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2025
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PSA: Don't use gmail. Sure, it is a good email and is free. And you may not care about privacy, even though you should. But the bigger danger is your e-mail being tied to your wider google and youtube account. Get banned for spamming youtube live chat, or writing "inappropriate" comment, or maybe for using ad-blocker in the future, and you can say goodbeye not just to your youtube account, but emails and drive data. This has already happend in the past, when youtube algorithm evaluated votening in livestream chat by sending 1 or 2 as spam and banned peoples entire google accounts.
This isn't about Republican officials using Gmail, it's about Republicans targeting Gmail addresses.
If you don't want to be identified as spam, don't send spammy content. Really that simple.
I am not telling that to republican politicians. There are clearly a lot of people who use gmail for republicans to care about it and I have seen people here worried gmail would stop respecting their filter settings. So I advise them to stop using gmail.
Article says similar spam from Dems got through.
.. doesn't it say Republicans claim similar spam from Democrats got through?
My main takeaway is the Republicans want to block Democrat messaging, and via projection, assume Google is doing the reverse.
No. A university study... I think.
So when I said "article" I meant the FTC letter OP linked to which, via footnote #2, in turn cites an article in New York Post which in turn cites the study.
A 2022 study by researchers at North Carolina State University found that Gmail flagged 59% more Republican fundraising emails as spam than Democratic ones during the leadup to the 2020 presidential election.
“We observed that the [spam filtering algorithms] of different email services indeed exhibit biases towards different political affiliations,” the researchers said at the time.
The consulting firm’s tests involved sending identical emails through Gmail, with the only difference being that one contained a WinRed donation link and the other contained an ActBlue link.
“The only difference between the two emails was the link,” the memo said. “ActBlue delivered. WinRed got flagged. That is not a coincidence.”
But I am confused: was a consultancy firm hired by the university? What kind of study contains a "memo"?
Even if it is indeed biased, surely Google is a business and can do as it pleases? Can Google/Alphabet get away with telling the FTC to eat a bag of dicks?
It could also be that winred is more often associated with spam because emails with winred links use a style more associated with other actual spam. Like if spammers use words like Trump a lot to try to scam victims, and a lot of those emails get flagged as spam, then the word Trump itself becomes more highly correlated with spam. And since the word Trump is highly associated with winred links, maybe winred gets caught up in the rule set/heuristics that associate Trump fundraisers with spam.
Ahh, fair point on the source. I should probably let myself wake up more before posting :P
You're right though, it's a weird "study"... feels more like a quick test I'd run locally to check my processes than anything with real rigor.
It'a all going to boil down to heuristics and phrasing. Republicans are sending content more likely to be identified as spam OR reciepients are flagging it as spam more often.
Compare the two, like side by side. Trust me one will clearly read as spam while the other reads as a typical fundraiser.
Its not even a good email provider. It has horribly aggressive filtering and logging in through a proper client like thunderbid/k9mail always requires tedious extra steps.
I like the "tags instead of folders" approach though. It's been a while since I checked; can a normal IMAP-based account + email client like Thunderbird do that these days?
I havent used gmail in a while. By tags do you mean that you can add one or more custom tags to emails that you can then use to filter by? If so, yes Thunderbird does support that, but i assume its locally stored information. You can sync your thunderbird profile across devices tho.
Yes, like sorting mails into folders except they can be in more than one at a time. It'd be nice if IMAP were updated to support that sort of thing sync'd on the server.
Gotta say paying a little bit for my own domain and thus private email service is amazing. So so soooo much less spam and it's super easy to create a disposable address that can get mail from potential spammers.
Have any suggestions on a decent alternative?
I've heard discouraging stories about protonmail but would like a viable no hassle alternative if you have one.
Proton is ok, also tuta
I use tuta. You can also add your own domain for infinite addresses (great for managing spam).
I've posted alot of inflammatory and violent comments on YouTube over the last 20 years, I think I'm good.
i think it's more the spamming, maybe dont do that because spam sucks.
Did you even read the full comment you replied to?