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. ...