Gmail gets approval to move forward with plan to ruin its spam filter
Your inbox’s spam filter hasjust one job: don’t show you messages you’re not interested in reading. In the bad old days, that required tons of manual rule lists, and spammers were quick to adapt. The arrival of Gmail and its impressively low-effort spam filter was nothing less than a godsend. Earlier this summer, though, we learned ofa Google plan that would break the way Gmail’s spam filter operated, intentionally letting political emails slip through. Today we get word that the Federal Election Commission has approved this scheme, and Google intends to move ahead with a pilot.
Google proposed a program to the FEC that would allow registered political candidates to distribute bulk emails through Gmail, without being unceremoniously directed to everyone’s spam boxes. The test would run through January, and messages would include a “prominent notification” allowing people to opt-out. Unfortunately, it sounds like that would be on a sender-by-sender basis, and Google may not give users the ability to opt-out from all future political mailings included in this project in one fell swoop.
The FEC clearly liked what it heard, including Google’s promises of nonpartisanship, andin a draft ruling expressed its approval. Subsequently, the companyconfirmed to 9to5Googlethat it’s going ahead with the plan, and will monitor feedback from everyone involved.
Google shares that its intent behind all of this “is to assess alternative ways of addressing concerns from bulk senders, while giving users clear controls over their inboxes to minimize unwanted email.”
It sure feels like Gmailalready hadclear controls forminimizing unwanted email, didn’t it, though? This seems like somethingotherthan “minimizing.”
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