The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week sent a letter to Google’s CEO demanding to know why Gmail was blocking messages from Republican senders while allegedly failing to block similar missives supporting Democrats. The letter followed media reports accusing Gmail of disproportionately flagging messages from the GOP fundraising platform WinRed and sending them to the spam folder. But according to experts who track daily spam volumes worldwide, WinRed’s messages are getting blocked more because its methods of blasting email are increasingly way more spammy than that of ActBlue, the fundraising platform for Democrats.
Image: nypost.com
On Aug. 13, The New York Post ran an “exclusive” story titled, “Google caught flagging GOP fundraiser emails as ‘suspicious’ — sending them directly to spam.” The story cited a memo from Targeted Victory – whose clients include the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), Rep. Steve Scalise and Sen. Marsha Blackburn – which said it observed that the “serious and troubling” trend was still going on as recently as June and July of this year.
“If Gmail is allowed to quietly suppress WinRed links while giving ActBlue a free pass, it will continue to tilt the playing field in ways that voters never see, but campaigns will feel every single day,” the memo reportedly said.
In an August 28 letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson cited the New York Post story and warned that Gmail’s parent Alphabet may be engaging in unfair or deceptive practices.
“Alphabet’s alleged partisan treatment of comparable messages or messengers in Gmail to achieve political objectives may violate both of these prohibitions under the FTC Act,” Ferguson wrote. “And the partisan treatment may cause harm to consumers.”
However, the situation looks very different when you ask spam experts what’s going on with WinRed’s recent messaging campaigns. Atro Tossavainen and Pekka Jalonen are co-founders at Koli-Lõks OÜ, an email intelligence company in Estonia. Koli-Lõks taps into real-time intelligence about daily spam volumes by monitoring large numbers of “spamtraps” — email addresses that are intentionally set up to catch unsolicited emails.
Spamtraps are generally not used for communication or account creation, but instead are created to identify senders exhibiting spammy behavior, such as scraping the Internet for email addresses or buying unmanaged distribution lists. As an email sender, blasting these spamtraps over and over with unsolicited email is the fastest way to ruin your domain’s reputation online. Such activity also virtually ensures that more of your messages are going to start getting listed on spam blocklists that are broadly shared within the global anti-abuse community.
Tossavainen told KrebsOnSecurity that WinRed’s emails hit its spamtraps in the .com, .net, and .org space far more frequently than do fundraising emails sent by ActBlue. Koli-Lõks published a graph of the stark disparity in spamtrap activity for WinRed versus ActBlue, showing a nearly fourfold increase in spamtrap hits from WinRed emails in the final week of July 2025.
Image: Koliloks.eu
“Many of our spamtraps are in repurposed legacy-TLD domains (.com, .org, .net) and therefore could be understood to have been involved with a U.S. entity in their pre-zombie life,” Tossavainen explained in the LinkedIn post.
Raymond Dijkxhoorn is the CEO and a founding member of SURBL, a widely-used blocklist that flags domains and IP addresses known to be used in unsolicited messages, phishing and malware distribution. Dijkxhoorn said their spamtrap data mirrors that of Koli-Lõks, and shows that WinRed has consistently been far more aggressive in sending email than ActBlue.
Dijkxhoorn said the fact that WinRed’s emails so often end up dinging the organization’s sender reputation is not a content issue but rather a technical one.
“On our end we don’t really care if the content is political or trying to sell viagra or penis enlargements,” Dijkxhoorn said. “It’s the mechanics, they should not end up in spamtraps. And that’s the reason the domain reputation is tempered. Not ‘because domain reputation firms have a political agenda.’ We really don’t care about the political situation anywhere. The same as we don’t mind people buying penis enlargements. But when either of those land in spamtraps it will impact sending experience.”
The FTC letter to Google’s CEO also referenced a debunked 2022 study (PDF) by political consultants who found Google caught more Republican emails in spam filters. Techdirt editor Mike Masnick notes that while the 2022 study also found that other email providers caught more Democratic emails as spam, “Republicans laser-focused on Gmail because it fit their victimization narrative better.”
Masnick said GOP lawmakers then filed both lawsuits and complaints with the Federal Election Commission (both of which failed easily), claiming this was somehow an “in-kind contribution” to Democrats.
“This is political posturing designed to keep the White House happy by appearing to ‘do something’ about conservative claims of ‘censorship,'” Masnick wrote of the FTC letter. “The FTC has never policed ‘political bias’ in private companies’ editorial decisions, and for good reason—the First Amendment prohibits exactly this kind of government interference.”
WinRed did not respond to a request for comment.
The WinRed website says it is an online fundraising platform supported by a united front of the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee (RNC), the NRSC, and the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC).
WinRed has recently come under fire for aggressive fundraising via text message as well. In June, 404 Media reported on a lawsuit filed by a family in Utah against the RNC for allegedly bombarding their mobile phones with text messages seeking donations after they’d tried to unsubscribe from the missives dozens of times.
One of the family members said they received 27 such messages from 25 numbers, even after sending 20 stop requests. The plaintiffs in that case allege the texts from WinRed and the RNC “knowingly disregard stop requests and purposefully use different phone numbers to make it impossible to block new messages.”
Dijkxhoorn said WinRed did inquire recently about why some of its assets had been marked as a risk by SURBL, but he said they appeared to have zero interest in investigating the likely causes he offered in reply.
“They only replied with, ‘You are interfering with U.S. elections,'” Dijkxhoorn said, noting that many of SURBL’s spamtrap domains are only publicly listed in the registration records for random domain names.
“They’re at best harvested by themselves but more likely [they] just went and bought lists,” he said. “It’s not like ‘Oh Google is filtering this and not the other,’ the reason isn’t the provider. The reason is the fundraising spammers and the lists they send to.”
I’ve sometimes wondered if individuals could sign up for a campaign they dislike, then mark their emails as spam, thus inducing their email provider to treat other emails from that campaign as spam.
Prolly wouldn’t work with just one prankster doing it, but if a posse of ’em ganged up, it might have an effect.
Well, you must agree that the vast majority people on the internet are not tech-savvy (if not plain idiots). They simply forget what they have signed for and/or are not reading the messages they receive that in 99% legitimate cases have clear unsubscribe instructions.
Pretty much anything GOP is synonymous to kookie these days. So i don’t doubt that they use those shady tactics to persuade naive hillbillies to vote for them.
As for Gmail I’m afraid that this tactic to use the federal government to bully companies might actually work. Look at NBC and Facebook. They caved in in no time.
I’m highly skeptical of any analysis saying Actblue sends less spam without seeing more of the methodology. From personal experience I know that donating to Actblue generated a tornado of unwanted email and years after unsubscribing I’m still magically being added to everyone associated with Actblues mailing list and even get readded directly to Actblue on several occasions. Actblue is spammier than a 2005 fake Viagra slinger. I don’t know anything about WinRed and couldn’t compare experiences; but maybe Actblue is better at proxying their spam through affiliates or at least better at pretending that people asked to be subscribed.
The best thing for the world would be for Gmail to get better at blocking both of them and for SMS spam filtering to get a thousand times better. Political spam shouldn’t get a hall pass. Shut down the MCColo’s of political spam.
> I don’t know anything about WinRed and couldn’t compare experiences; but maybe Actblue is better at proxying their spam through affiliates or at least better at pretending that people asked to be subscribed.
Out of curiosity, I pulled up the SPF records for both of their domains (probably not an exact match for the email campaigns they run, but I assume fairly indicative of their overall operations). The WinRed server list is *literally* a subset of ActBlue! ActBlue has 40 additional CIDRs to send their junk from; it’s twice the size of WinRed.
The kicker is that “red” won, but are acting like losers. The smarter play would be to project the strength of being able to do more with less. The success *despite* the censorship. It seems like the GOP is instead being made to look weak by whatever corporate interest is apparently behind both these emailers.
> Political spam shouldn’t get a hall pass. Shut down the MCColo’s of political spam.
Absolutely. At *best*, this accusation indicates that political spam is ineffective. Possibly even counterproductive. I mean, if the complaint is that your messages are being blocked, but the voters you couldn’t pester end up giving you a victory, then *you* need to be DOGE’d.
You are making a common mistake in the following statement.
“The kicker is that “red” won, but are acting like losers. ”
Here’s the mistake, in politics you are always working on the next election!
So of course, they are screaming now.
> Here’s the mistake, in politics you are always working on the next election!
The mistake is yours: my statements were indeed future-looking. For some reason, you’ve bought into the broken logic of political hacks that seem to always *lose* “the next election”. You’d all do well to start thinking critically about the evidence as it presents itself. This is a site for following security-related issues, not playing silly political games.
> So of course, they are screaming now.
Let the crybabies cry. Their interests are not aligned with securing a GOP victory. They are aligned with their business continuing to make a profit by sending political spam that correlates with winners being turned into losers.
The implication of the story is that people who either don’t opt-in or later opt-out are receiving unsolicited email. If you opt in, it’s not considered spam (even if you may think it’s too much).
Did you read the article, the parts about “spamtraps” and how that’s actually what informs the spam lists?
It has nothing to do with “who is sending more vs less political emails” – as the article makes rather clear, I thought.
“I’m highly skeptical of any analysis saying Actblue sends less spam without seeing more of the methodology.”
How are you going to be “seeing the methodology” if you don’t even read critical parts of a 1-2 page article?
I can verify everything they said in this article. Someone mistakenly used one of my email addresses and signed up with WinRed. The unsubscribe links do not work. And they keep coming at you with different domains there’s no way to block it. Let me say again the unsubscribe links go to a page that does not allow you to click the unsubscribe button!
Let’s be clear here. It’s not that WinRed and their fellow offenders do not understand anti-spam technology. They don’t WANT to understand. As another post says so well, the this complaint fits their victim narrative.
You don’t even have to scratch the surface to see the “stolen election.” It’s right there in the open.
I filter all political messages. Not interested in national politics except about 4 weeks before the Presidential election. The rest of the time, I’ll fax a letter to my congress-critters prior to votes on issue that I care about.
I want 1-way communication with my representatives and have ZERO interest in any political party. I think political parties are bad for the USA. I want to vote for a person with their own ideas on topics, not forced to follow “the party line” on everything.
There are laws that specifically exclude/allow spamming our mail and our phones with political messages, while blocking other unwanted spam contacts. Somehow there’s always political exception.
You really have become too political and it’s sad you only report things that align with your political views…there’s just as many (actually way more) stories about the left you could report on but you don’t…you’ve become a political hack and it’s sad because I used enjoy reading true cyber related stories vs the stuff you do now
Would you mind sharing with us what the stories about the left that could be reported on? I’m genuinely interested.
Right? Ever since Mr. Krebs made the comment (I’m paraphrasing) that “this is what you get when you voted for a 34-time convicted felon” or something like that. Anyone who actually looked at that trial with a fair mind realizes how unfair that trial was. This guy did a great job of explaining it, much better than I could hope to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmSiSvJmukk
Ever since I read that comment by Mr. Krebs, I just don’t believe what he writes. Even the non-political articles, I second-guess everything. It’s sad that politics taints everything nowadays.
I did? Prove it. Shouldn’t be hard if you’re right. I don’t ever recall saying or printing anything like that.
Is it considered politically ‘strong’ to be an unapologetic illiterate in this MAGA GOP? There seems to be two distinct swaths now, some living in some angry semblance of our shared reality and others living in a world of purely uninformed butthurt coupled with an apparent methamphetamine addiction.
Even if BK ever _had_ mentioned Trump’s multiple felony convictions as an aside, it’s a still a fact all day long. Fat man was convicted! He’s the only US President ever anywhere near this level of demonstrated imprudence. He also cheats at golf! He also cheated on his current wife! With certainty beyond a reasonable doubt, these are facts and they are proven at length much to your whiny butthurt chagrin. Don’t like it? You don’t have to!
But just so we clear that up once and for all, it’s NOT a political view – it’s FACT. BK has been exceptionally careful to avoid unnecessarily inflaming the inflamed syphilitic incontinence that is the MAGA movement, in no small part because reading your pathetic conspiracy theory BS wastes otherwise useful time in a given day. If you want to whine about something BK is clearly NOT doing, why not pretend he’s the lifelong friend of a pedophile or something? Why not pretend he’s bankrupted casinos and failed at business dozens, hundreds of times? Clever it up kids. Fat man can afford better trolls than you.
You’re here venting your infected spleen because you believe (and are wrong, lol) that BK (ONCE!) talked impolitely about the cheating felon fat man with the tiny diseased hands and obvious baldness issue. This is essentially what you’ve reduced your political viewpoint down to – butthurt, misplaced anger at the facts, a wild persecution complex, complete and demonstrated denial of reality, and pathetic servitude to a cult of personality born from reality television and years of trying and failing to have sex with his own daughter.
But if you had ANY insights into how spam traps work or how Google operated them that was factual and called any of BK’s research and insights into question as a matter of record, we’d have absolutely entertained that. In fact, go ahead now and find anything, ANYTHING about this article you disbelieve, or think is ‘political’, and point it out to us. Be specific, find something to point to.
Of course, if you can’t do that, do yourself and the rest of us a strong favor and just shut the hell up.
Enough. You wonder why you get trapped in spam traps, we wonder how you even get the cans open.
You goofy kids sound crazy AF trying to blame Krebs for the fact that Donald Trump is a convicted felon.
Man up, MAGA simps. Reality is smacking you in the face constantly, not Brian. Get used to it, stop whining.
I’m very sorry M.K. for your inability to read and parse almost completely apolitical articles.
That must be very limiting for your self-censored worldview.
Masnick is one of the biggest shills on the Internet. I’m sure that other email providers catch more democrat propaganda than Gmail. They also probably have less than 1% of the volume of Gmail.
What do you base this ‘surety’ on? Anything that actually exists that you can point to, or… not so much?
I am on Marsha Blackburns list (you get signed up if you ever email her about anything) and it is impossible to get removed from and violates the Can SPAM Act…but no amount of reporting to the FTC or FCC has changed this.
First let me say that I am Independent who support Donald Trump. I had given to the Republican Party in the Past (WinRed) but found myself being constantly spammed by them and spam phone calls, despite pressing “1” to be removed from the list for 2 months it was like I was being stalked by them (my wife’s words). I will never give to the WinRed organization again and will only make donations directly to whomever I want to. That being said I don’t doubt that the “Lefties” over at Google do have Algorism’s that continue to block conservative viewpoints.
I’ve had to manually block 2 domains spamming my mail server ever since I bought a MAGA hat for my mother way back in 2018. I got an uptick in conservative spam which tapered off by unsubscribing. But not these bozos.
*.rightsideaction.com
*.redfirstusa.com
I’ll forever more flag every single email and text message I ever receive from any person, organization or cause affiliated with Republicans as spam. Because that’s literally all any emails or texts from them are, total spam.
It is quite simple really. GOP is against expertise of any sort. It is no wonder that they just send out any old rubbish and complain when it is flagged. The Dems on the other hand actually have experts who know how to circumvent the spam filters.
By “circumvent the spam filters” you actually mean “not use deprecated lists that spam-bomb the existing and voluminous spam traps, setting off the reputation consequences for the sender that cause spams to be correctly marked as spam and routed accordingly.”
It’s like saying “you must be a bee expert because you’re not constantly covered in stings and screaming, yet somehow managed to obtain honey.”
It’s not about “circumventing” anything. It’s about understanding how the Bayes Algorithm (the thing that governs most spam filters) works and doing real basic things like registering your email server with DKIM to make yourself look a lot less less like some fly-by-night, pump-and-dump mailserver that is born, then promptly craps itself out of existence.
Ever tried to send a mail through the post office without a return address? What does the Post Office do? They send it back to you, don’t they?
As someone else here said, with the GOP, the lack of basic competence isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. They despise “intellectual elites”, so their hiring pools mostly slum the very bottom of the barrel. This concept is plainly visible in most of Trump’s cabinet.
Think he can tolerate anyone smarter than him? Hell no.
“Ever tried to send a mail through the post office without a return address? What does the Post Office do? They send it back to you, don’t they?”
Um, well no. Mail is sent without a return address all the time. But I know very of very few instances where the mail would be returned to the sender who DID NOT put their return address on the envelope. I mean, how would they know where to even return it to?
What am I missing here?
Probably visiting a Post Office in person, for starters.
@SkunkWerks
How exactly is the post office going to return mail to you if there is no return address?? How do they decide who/where to send it to?? Your lack of common sense (or even uncommon sense) is astounding!!!
But, arn’t the filters being set by users, and not Google?
Google would have a base set of rules which over time are influenced/modified/trained/tuned by end-user behavior.
My father was really into guns (he owned over 50 handguns), and though he’s been dead for nearly 6 years, his Gmail (which my mom keeps active just in case) account gets dozens and dozens of right-wing and gun emails per day. It’s staggering how much it truly is. He never made political donations, so I believe it’s almost entirely due to his gun interests.
Somehow I’ve been able to have those emails go to junk mail on my Outlook/Hotmail account.
IIRC there was something common in the hidden header data that I used to create a rule to send to “Junk” using desktop Outlook.
That and using the “Report Message” extension seems to help also.
The bottom line is don’t ever use your everyday email with any politician or political party. Use email aliases and set up rules to auto-delete, send to junk or whatever.
Since I came of age, I’ve always voted Republican over the ‘godless’ Democrats. Until W (first term). I haven’t voted Republican since. And the GOP has gotten far, far worse.
FWIW, I apologize to my fellow Americans. The ideals of the Democratic Party aren’t mine – but I despise the GOP for its arrogance and hypocrisy!
I am conservative and religious. But why do we conservative and religious people keep falling for Fascism? In Germany. In Italy. And now in America?
“Sir, you can’t park there.”
“You are interfering with US elections.”
Just say it with BS confidence, discussion over. I’m definitely going to use that.
I am quite surprised that there is only one “I used to like you until you went all political” comment on this article. Just the headline alone would usually draw them in like there’s no tomorrow.
Spam FIlters can’t melt steel beams though…
Spam Filters can’t melt steel beams.
Cosmo:
There’s a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it’s not about who’s got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think… it’s all about the information!
Remember Parler?
Literally de-platformed
I think something that is missing in this discussion is that many spammers coopt political issues to send you to malicious domains. I’ve never been able to count how many links lead to suspicious sites, but they all try to sound like real GOP spam. I don’t like either and that is why I will never again give to any political party. I just don’t want either their spam or real spam flavored by their interests. When I can’t unsubscribe, it’s spam. But I’ve seen that the apolitical bad guys are quick to adopt a political face if they think it gives them any chance you’ll click.
So many bad points here it’s laughable. Republicans are right here.
Winred and Actblue are just platforms so saying either one sends more spam is incorrect. That is like saying Weather.com sends more spam than theweatherchannel.com so all emails with a link to weather.com will be sent to spam, even if it’s between 1-1 chains. If you suppress sends due to spam traps, it needs to be by the domain sending those, not a whole industry at large.
They are right to be locked in on Google because Gmail accounts for more than 80% of the traffic. If you can’t talk to supporters on gmail, that is a huge messaging and fundraising disadvantage.
Foreign based companies like “Koli-Lõks OÜ, an email intelligence company in Estonia” and SURBL of the Netherlands should not be leading to the suppression of political mail. It is election interference. The orgs mentioned above have all reported being suppressed by these foreign entities, not for breaking sending best-practices, but for “content” which boils down to Orange man bad.
Gmail also proved they have levers when they setup the Google Pilot Program for political senders. The two months that republicans we’re able to inbox as well as democrats, they outraised them 3-1 in small dollars. The program shut down immediatley after that.
“All the data proves what everyone sees, but some “experts” we found from foreign countires, who hate the red team say otherwise. Look they even have less data and a made up chart!” Give me a break. Google is suppressing mail that follows best practices for one side, and letting mail fly freely for the other. They got caught and now are pretending they didnt.