US approves Google plan to let political emails bypass Gmail spam filter

The Federal Election Commission gave the go-ahead for the plan on Thursday. Gmail's pilot program is permissible under the Federal Election Campaign Act and FEC regulations, according to the advisory opinion adopted by the FEC.

A pilot program to test new Gmail design features at no cost was approved by the FEC. The FEC gave the go-ahead for the pilot after Republicans accused the company of giving them an advantage.

The Republicans could have avoided some of their email problems if they used the correct email configuration. The Washington Post reported that at a May 22nd meeting between Senate Republicans and the chief legal officer of Google, "the most powerful rebuke" came from Sen. Marco Rubio (R- Fla.), who claimed that not a single email from one of his addresses was reaching inboxes." According to people briefed on the discussions, the reason was that a vendor didn't enable a tool that would keep messages from being marked as junk mail.

According to Techdirt's Mike Masnick, it sounds like the spamming operation didn't set up a DKIM/DMARCAuthentication. I'm aware that this is a problem for a lot of people. It's something we've had to deal with at Techdirt after we realized that a lot of our emails were being sent to people who didn't want to hear from us. We explored the details and found a way to fix our email configuration.

One of the study's authors said Republicans misrepresented the findings.

Gmail users don’t want this

Users of the email service submitted comments to the FEC. There were over 2,500 comments received by the FEC.

Three Republicans and a Democrat voted for the order approving the plan. Ellen Weintraub, a Democrat who voted against the order, said she has a hard time getting around the fact that this is a unique benefit offered to political committees and only to political committees.

"I don't want to support this, and it's for the same reasons all the commenters don't want to, but I think the law and commissioner regulations and commission precedent Permits this." Broussard was a democrat.

"We appreciate the FEC's quick review of our request and we will reflect on the positive and negative feedback received during the public comment period," the company said in a statement. The goal of the pilot program is to assess alternative ways of addressing concerns from bulk senders while giving users clear controls over their inboxes. As the pilot rolls out, we'll keep an eye on feedback to make sure it's meeting its goals.