“`html

The leader of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) dispatched a correspondence last week to Google’s CEO seeking clarification on why Gmail was obstructing messages from Republican senders while supposedly neglecting to block comparable communications favoring Democrats. This correspondence followed news reports alleging that Gmail was disproportionately tagging messages from the GOP fundraising site WinRed and transferring them to the spam folder. However, experts monitoring daily spam levels globally assert that WinRed’s messages are being obstructed more due to their methods of mass emailing being increasingly more spam-like than those of ActBlue, the fundraising site for Democrats.

On August 13, The New York Post published an “exclusive” article entitled, “Google caught tagging GOP fundraiser emails as ‘suspicious’ — routing them straight to spam.” The article referred to a memo from Targeted Victory – with clients that include the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), Rep. Steve Scalise, and Sen. Marsha Blackburn – indicating that it had observed the “serious and alarming” trend still ongoing as recently as June and July of this year.

“Should Gmail be permitted to subtly suppress WinRed links while allowing ActBlue a free ride, it will continue to skew the playing field in ways that voters are unaware of, yet campaigns will experience every day,” the memo apparently stated.

In a letter dated August 28 to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson referenced the New York Post article and cautioned that Gmail’s parent Alphabet might be participating in unfair or misleading practices.

“Alphabet’s purported partisan treatment of similar messages or senders in Gmail to meet political aims might violate both of these prohibitions under the FTC Act,” Ferguson noted. “And this partisan treatment could lead to consumer harm.”

Nonetheless, the circumstances appear quite different when consulting spam specialists regarding WinRed’s recent email campaigns. Atro Tossavainen and Pekka Jalonen are co-founders of Koli-Lõks OÜ, an email intelligence firm based in Estonia. Koli-Lõks gathers real-time insights into daily spam levels by overseeing a wide array of “spamtraps” — email addresses purposely designed to capture unsolicited emails.

Spamtraps are typically not utilized for communication or account creation; rather, they are established to identify senders demonstrating spam-like behaviors, such as scraping the web for email addresses or purchasing unmanaged distribution lists. For email senders, repeatedly bombarding these spamtraps with unsolicited outreach is the quickest route to tarnishing your domain’s online reputation. Such actions also nearly guarantee that more of your messages will begin to feature on spam blocklists that are widely shared within the global anti-abuse community.

Tossavainen shared with KrebsOnSecurity that WinRed’s emails encountered its spamtraps in the .com, .net, and .org domains considerably more often than fundraising emails dispatched by ActBlue. Koli-Lõks released a chart highlighting the stark contrast in spamtrap engagement for WinRed compared to ActBlue, showing nearly a fourfold rise in spamtrap encounters from WinRed emails the final week of July 2025.

“Numerous spamtraps we use reside in repurposed legacy TLD domains (.com, .org, .net) and thus could be perceived as having been associated with a U.S. entity in their prior function,” Tossavainen elaborated in a LinkedIn post.

Raymond Dijkxhoorn is the CEO and a founding participant of SURBL, a widely-utilized blocklist that flags domains and IP addresses recognized for use in unsolicited communications, phishing, and malware dissemination. Dijkxhoorn indicated that their spamtrap information aligns closely with that of Koli-Lõks, demonstrating that WinRed has persistently been more aggressive in sending emails than ActBlue.

Dijkxhoorn stated that the frequent placement of WinRed’s emails in spamtraps is not a content problem but rather a technical one.

“From our perspective, we don’t particularly care if the content is political or promoting products like Viagra or penis enlargements,” Dijkxhoorn said. “It’s the mechanics; they ought not to end up in spamtraps. And that’s why there’s a negative impact on domain reputation. It’s not ‘because domain reputation firms have a political agenda.’ We genuinely don’t have any concern regarding the political climate anywhere. Just as we aren’t perturbed by anyone purchasing penis enlargements. However, when either of those situations appears in spamtraps, it will affect the sending experience.”

The FTC correspondence to Google’s CEO also mentioned a discredited 2022 research (PDF) conducted by political consultants who determined that Google captured more Republican emails in spam filters. Techdirt editor Mike Masnick points out that while the 2022 study also discovered that other email services detected more Democratic emails as spam, “Republicans concentrated on Gmail because it aligned better with their victimization narrative.”

Masnick highlighted that GOP legislators subsequently lodged both lawsuits and complaints with the Federal Election Commission (both of which were swiftly dismissed), claiming this constituted an “in-kind contribution” to Democrats.

“This represents political maneuvering aimed at placating the White House by appearing to ‘take action’ regarding conservative claims of ‘censorship,’” Masnick remarked about the FTC letter. “The FTC has never regulated ‘political bias’ in the editorial decisions of private entities, and for valid reasons—the First Amendment prohibits exactly this type of governmental interference.”

WinRed has yet to respond to a request for commentary.

The WinRed site claims it is an online fundraising platform backed by a coalition of the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee (RNC), the NRSC, and the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC).

WinRed has recently faced criticism for aggressive fundraising through text messages as well. In June, 404 Media reported on a lawsuit initiated by a family in Utah against the RNC for allegedly inundating their mobile devices with text messages requesting donations after they had attempted to unsubscribe from the messages multiple times.

One family member reported receiving 27 such messages from 25 different numbers, even after sending 20 stop requests. The plaintiffs in that case assert that the texts from WinRed and the RNC “deliberately ignore stop requests and intentionally use various phone numbers to make it infeasible to block new messages.”

Dijkxhoorn mentioned that WinRed did recently inquire about why certain assets had been flagged as a risk by SURBL, but he noted their apparent lack of interest in investigating the probable causes he provided in response.

“They merely responded with, ‘You are interfering with U.S. elections,’” Dijkxhoorn stated, indicating that numerous SURBL spamtrap domains are only publicly registered under random domain names.

“They’re at best harvested by themselves, but more likely [they] simply purchased lists,” he explained. “It’s not like ‘Oh Google is filtering this and not the other’; the issue doesn’t lie with the provider. The issue is the fundraising spammers and the lists they distribute.”

“`