The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission<\/strong> (FTC) last week sent a letter to Google\u2019s 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<\/strong> and sending them to the spam folder. But according to experts who track daily spam volumes worldwide, WinRed\u2019s messages are getting blocked more because its methods of blasting email are increasingly way more spammy than that of ActBlue<\/strong>, the fundraising platform for Democrats.<\/p>\n Image: nypost.com<\/p>\n<\/div>\n On Aug. 13, The New York Post<\/strong> ran an \u201cexclusive\u201d story<\/a> titled, \u201cGoogle caught flagging GOP fundraiser emails as \u2018suspicious\u2019 \u2014 sending them directly to spam.\u201d The story cited a memo from Targeted Victory \u2013 whose clients include the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), Rep. Steve Scalise and Sen. Marsha Blackburn \u2013 which said it observed that the \u201cserious and troubling\u201d trend was still going on as recently as June and July of this year.<\/p>\n \u201cIf 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,\u201d the memo reportedly said.<\/p>\n In an August 28 letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai<\/strong>, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson<\/strong> cited the New York Post story and warned that Gmail\u2019s parent Alphabet<\/strong> may be engaging in unfair or deceptive practices.<\/p>\n \u201cAlphabet\u2019s alleged partisan treatment of comparable messages or messengers in Gmail to achieve political objectives may violate both of these prohibitions under the FTC Act,\u201d Ferguson wrote. \u201cAnd the partisan treatment may cause harm to consumers.\u201d<\/p>\n However, the situation looks very different when you ask spam experts what\u2019s going on with WinRed\u2019s recent messaging campaigns. Atro Tossavainen<\/strong> and Pekka Jalonen<\/strong> are co-founders at Koli-L\u00f5ks O\u00dc<\/a>, an email intelligence company in Estonia. Koli-L\u00f5ks taps into real-time intelligence about daily spam volumes by monitoring large numbers of \u201cspamtraps\u201d \u2014 email addresses that are intentionally set up to catch unsolicited emails.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Tossavainen told KrebsOnSecurity that WinRed\u2019s emails hit its spamtraps in the .com, .net, and .org space far more frequently than do fundraising emails sent by ActBlue. Koli-L\u00f5ks 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.<\/p>\n Image: Koliloks.eu<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cMany 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,\u201d Tossavainen explained in the LinkedIn post.<\/span><\/p>\n Raymond Dijkxhoorn<\/strong> is the CEO and a founding member of SURBL<\/a>, 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-L\u00f5ks, and shows that WinRed has consistently been far more aggressive in sending email than ActBlue.<\/p>\n Dijkxhoorn said the fact that WinRed\u2019s emails so often end up dinging the organization\u2019s sender reputation is not a content issue but rather a technical one.<\/p>\n \u201cOn our end we don\u2019t really care if the content is political or trying to sell viagra or penis enlargements,\u201d Dijkxhoorn said. \u201cIt\u2019s the mechanics, they should not end up in spamtraps. And that\u2019s the reason the domain reputation is tempered. Not \u2018because domain reputation firms have a political agenda.\u2019 We really don\u2019t care about the political situation anywhere. The same as we don\u2019t mind people buying penis enlargements. But when either of those land in spamtraps it will impact sending experience.\u201d<\/p>\n The FTC letter to Google\u2019s CEO also referenced a debunked<\/a> 2022 study<\/a> (PDF) by political consultants who found Google caught more Republican emails in spam filters. Techdirt<\/strong> editor Mike Masnick<\/strong> notes that while the 2022 study also found that other email providers caught more Democratic emails as spam, \u201cRepublicans laser-focused on Gmail because it fit their victimization narrative better.\u201d<\/p>\n Masnick said GOP lawmakers then filed both lawsuits and complaints with the Federal Election Commission<\/strong> (both of which failed easily), claiming this was somehow an \u201cin-kind contribution\u201d to Democrats.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is political posturing designed to keep the White House happy by appearing to \u2018do something\u2019 about conservative claims of \u2018censorship,’\u201d Masnick wrote<\/a> of the FTC letter. \u201cThe FTC has never policed \u2018political bias\u2019 in private companies\u2019 editorial decisions, and for good reason\u2014the First Amendment prohibits exactly this kind of government interference.\u201d<\/p>\n WinRed did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n The WinRed website says it is an online fundraising platform supported by a united front of the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee<\/strong> (RNC), the NRSC,\u00a0and the National Republican Congressional Committee<\/strong> (NRCC).<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/krebsonsecurity.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/nyp-google-spam.png?resize=749%2C255&ssl=1\")
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