Google promises changes after Gmail flagged GOP emails as ‘dangerous’

Google is promising the Trump administration that it will end a practice that led to Republican fundraising emails being flagged as “dangerous” spam, according to a letter obtained by The Daily Wire.
The commitment comes after Federal Trade Commissioner Andrew Ferguson pressed Google over reports that its email platform was filtering emails from Republican fundraising platform WinRed as spam while not applying the same scrutiny to Democrat platform ActBlue. Google pinned the blame for the labeling on its partnership with a third-party company and committed to no longer using that company’s spam list, according to a Friday letter to Ferguson obtained by The Daily Wire.
“Your letter inquires about a recent example of a warning label that appeared on certain emails that included a link from a fundraising organization,” wrote Anne Wall, the head of federal government affairs and public policy for Google. “The label appeared after a third-party company, SURBL, placed that fundraising organization on its abuse list. The organization’s presence on SURBL’s list, combined with other signals, resulted in the warning label.”
SURBL is a corporation based in the Netherlands that compiles an intelligence database used to flag unwanted emails. Wall said that SURBL was just one of the hundreds of “signals” Gmail used to target unwanted messages.
In light of the complaints, she said that Google would no longer use SURBL’s list to weed out spam.
“Google took the concerns raised by the fundraising organization very seriously,” she told Ferguson. “We promptly evaluated whether we could protect Gmail users from unwanted spam without reliance on the SURBL signal, and determined that our own advanced protections are the most effective way to protect users. As a result, we stopped incorporating SURBL as a signal.”
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