Tulsi v. Google response

On Friday Google’s lawyers filed their response to the Gabbard Campaign’s first amended complaint. They asked for the case to be moved to the Northern District of CA as per the contractual agreement that the campaign signed. They also asked for a dismissal as they are not a government entity nor acting in place of a government entity and thus are not covered under either the 1st or the 14th amendments.

Image of a courthouse.

I pulled this case initially because it looked like there was going to be an email component to it. The first amended complaint reduced all the email content down to 1 paragraph.

117. Additionally, Gabbard has learned that email communications sent by the Campaign are classified as Spam by Google’s Gmail product at disproportionately high rates. Few Gmail users regularly check their spam folders. Many never do. Gmail’s Spam filter—which relies on secret algorithms designed and controlled entirely by Google—appear to go out of their way to silence messages from the Campaign, further hindering Tulsi’s ability to convey her message to the American people.

Google’s response to that paragraph was pretty straightforward.

D. Plaintiff’s Allegations Regarding Gmail Spam Filtering
The only other allegations Plaintiff offers about Google’s actions in regard to the campaign is the passing suggestion that “[Ms.] Gabbard has learned that email communications sent by [Plaintiff] are classified as Spam by Google’s Gmail product at disproportionately high rates.” FAC ¶ 117. This allegation is unadorned and unexplained. The FAC does not explain what “disproportionally high rates” is supposed to mean, what comparisons were done with other political campaigns or advertisers, or what basis Ms. Gabbard has for alleging this supposedly disproportionate spam classification.2

2 “Spam” is defined generally as unsolicited bulk email messages. Google maintains detailed Sender Guidelines that explain how to avoid having emails classified as “spam.” See White Decl., Exhibit 3 [pdf link]. Plaintiff does not allege whether any of the emails that Google’s system allegedly classified as “spam” were, in fact, “spam” under Google’s policies. 

At this point, there’s no reason for an email blog to follow this case. Email is a single, unsubstantiated paragraph alleging delivery problems and Google’s response is to point out their publicly available sender guidelines page. Nothing to see here.

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Google makes connections

One of the client projects I’m working on includes doing a lot of research on MXs, including some classification work. Part of the work involves identifying the company running the MX. Many of the times this is obvious; mail.protection.outlook.com is office365, for instance.

There are other cases where the connection between the MX and the host company is not as obvious. That’s where google comes into play. Take the domain canit.ca, it’s a MX for quite a few domains in this data set. Step one is to visit the website, but there’s no website there. Step 2 is drop the domain into google, who tells me it’s Roaring Penguin software.
In some cases, though, the domain wasn’t as obvious as the Roaring Penguin link. In those cases, Google would present me with seemingly irrelevant hosting pages. It didn’t make sense until I started digging through hosting documentation. Inevitably, whenever Google gave me results that didn’t make sense, they were right. The links were often buried in knowledge base pages telling users how to configure their setup and mentioning the domain I was searching for.
The interesting piece was that often it was the top level domain, not the support pages, that Google presented to me. I had to go find the actual pages. Based on that bit of research, it appears that Google has a comprehensive map of what domains are related to each other.
This is something we see in their handling of email as well. Gmail regularly makes connections between domains that senders don’t expect. I’ve been speaking for a while about how Gmail does this, based on observation of filtering behavior. Working through multiple searches looking at domain names was the first time I saw evidence of the connections I suspected. Gmail is able to connect seemingly disparate hostnames and relate them to one another.
For senders, it means that using different domains in an attempt to isolate different mainstreams doesn’t work. Gmail understands that domainA in acquisition mail is also the same as domainB in opt-in mail is the same as domainC in transactional mail. Companies can develop a reputation at Google which affects all email, not just a particular mail stream. This makes it harder for senders to compartmentalize their sends and requires compliance throughout the organization.
Acquisition programs do hurt all mail programs, at least at Gmail.
 

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Update on Tulsi Gabbard sues Google

Back in July the Tulsi Gabbard campaign sued Google for deactivating their “advertising account” on the night of the first Democratic debate. I’ve been waiting for the Google response, which was due to be filed today.

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Google problems

It’s been a bit of a problematic week for Google. In the last few days they’ve had a number of outages or problems across different services. There was a major outage of Google Calendar. All email, including some spam, was delivering to the primary tab instead of the correct tab. Additionally, Google postmaster tools hasn’t been updated in over a week.

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