Gmail Verified Sender Program

Beginning September 2026 Google will allow qualifying US political senders to enroll their domains in the Gmail Verified Sender Program. The program requires that the sender follow existing bulk sender guidelines, use Google Postmaster Tools, and not send spam. In return Gmail’s filters will treat the sender differently.

Background

In 2022 an academic paper¹ was published which concluded that message filters exhibited political bias during the 2020 (US) election. It didn’t matter that the paper conflated the supposed bias with normal filter operations or that it found that bias was not uniformly in favor of one party. The genie was out of the bottle. Legislation was proposed² which would compel filter operators to exclude political messages from decision making algorithms; messages could still be manually blocked or marked as spam by the recipient.

In response Google received approval³ from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to launch a pilot of what they called the Verified Sender Program. The pilot, which ran from August 2022 to January 2023, allowed qualifying political senders to avoid Gmail’s regular spam filters provided that they kept their complaint rate below 5%. Recipients had the option to block all further communication from a sender.

What’s different this time

First is the complaint threshold. To stay in the program a sender needs to maintain a fourteen day rolling average complaint rate of below 0.3%. That’s much lower than the 5% in the pilot and in line with Gmail’s current general sender requirements.

Second is that unlike the pilot Google do not say that qualifying senders are exempted from all algorithmic filtering.

Google’s spam filters detect and filter over 99.9% of spam, phishing, and malware from ever reaching users’ inboxes. Google’s filtering of spam email is based on user feedback and does not discriminate against any candidate, political belief, or political entity.

and

If suspended or terminated, your domain can continue to send email to Gmail recipients and will be subject to Gmail’s standard spam filtering.

Google are definitely relaxing some filtering but I imagine it is more nuanced and connected with the my third observation.

Third is that the language this time has a strong emphasis on sender identity being the differentiator.

While program enrollment establishes sender authenticity, deliverability ultimately depends on your ongoing compliance with the Program Policies… and positive recipient engagement as reflected in your domain’s spam rate.

If I were to guess I’d say that this program is mainly about Gmail differentiating legitimate political senders from impersonators who often send similar or in some cases identical content.

What this is not

A license to spam. Spamming is still prohibited. Like with the pilot, enrollment in the program does not give senders a license to spam.

Spam: Do not send spam, including unsolicited, repetitive, nonsensical, or unrelated commercial content.

and

Please keep in mind that your definition of “unsolicited” mail may differ from your email recipients’ perception. Exercise judgment when sending email to a large number of recipients, even if the recipients elected to receive emails from you in the past and increase volume slowly to avoid delivery problems.

The program registers domains associated with senders meaning that the bad actor practice of rotating the same content through multiple domains, sending IPs, and ESPs in an attempt to game filters and ESP compliance will not work.

A way to avoid or ignore unsubscribe requests. The CAN-SPAM Act⁴ requires the ability to unsubscribe but it only applies to commercial messages. This has led bad actors to not include unsubscribe links or just ignore unsubscribe requests. However the program requires adherence to Gmail’s existing bulk sender requirements which explicitly require providing an easy unsubscribe.

Always give recipients an easy way to unsubscribe from your messages. Letting people opt out of your messages can improve open rates, click-through rates, and sending efficiency.

Conclusion

It is impossible to tell what impact this program will have until there is months worth of data, feedback, and of course commentary.

Overall I think that if you are a qualifying political sender and already meet Google’s sender requirements then you should register as it may protect your messages from the bad actors replaying your content.