We frequently hear that email gets lost in the so-called "Junk Mail" folder or not even delivered at all. Now we know one big reason why this is happening: Google's Gmail is flagging email it doesn't want you to see so that it diverts as spam directly to the proverbial round file. It doesn't matter if the email was originally sent from a Gmail account or not; it is enough to just pass through a Gmail server to receive the "tag". 

This is a most outrageous violation of Free Speech and the First Amendment that we have ever seen, and it is almost impossible to get around it. Gmail currently captures at least 38 percent of total worldwide market share for email services. 

Furthermore, if you have a Gmail account but access it through another email client, such as Apple's Mail program, you may not even see the junk folder at all! This is because there are special instructions add folders in addition to the Inbox. 

CFFS staff is shocked by the ramification of this because almost 50 percent of our entire membership depends on Gmail. This means that up to 35 percent of our outbound emails may not be landing in your Inbox correctly. Obviously, you should frequently check  your Junk/Spam folder to see what you missed. 

A better solution is to get rid of Gmail and move to another email service, of which there are many: 

• Startmail.com - Small monthly fee, private, encrypted
• ProtonMail.com - Free and premium accounts
• Reagan.com - Small monthly fee
• Tutanota.com - Free and premium accounts
• HushMail.com - Annual fee

Of course, there are others like Yahoo! mail. Outlook, Mail.com and Yandex.com. We are not making any recommendations, but if you are currently using Gmail, we strongly recommend that you do some research, ask around and find something you are comfortable with.

Google’s Gmail favors left-wing candidates, sends far more emails from conservatives to spam: study

A new study found that Google’s Gmail favors liberal candidates, allowing the vast majority of emails from left-wing politicians to land in the user’s inbox while more than two-thirds of messages from conservative candidates are marked as spam.

North Carolina State University’s Department of Computer Science published, "A Peek into the Political Biases in Email Spam Filtering Algorithms During US Election 2020," last week in order to determine if spam filtering algorithms (SFAs) are biased toward a particular political party or ideology. The extensive study took place over a course of five months, from July 1, 2020 to November 30, 2020 on Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo. They created 102 email accounts and subscribed to two Presidential, 78 Senate, and 156 House candidates. 

"To accurately estimate the political biases and mitigate any potential effects of demographics (ethnicity, age, and gender), we created multiple email accounts with different combinations of demographic factors and designed two experiments. The first experiment studies the general trends of biases in SFAs across the email services for the Presidential, Senate and House candidates. The second experiment studies the impact of different email interactions such as reading the emails, marking them as spam, or vice versa on the biases in SFAs. We designed an automated process to perform all the subscriptions, and took periodic backups to keep all the email accounts active as well as to keep track of the correct number of spam emails received over the course of data collection for each of the three services," they wrote. 

"We made several important observations in our study. For example, as an aggregate trend, Gmail leaned towards the left while Outlook and Yahoo leaned towards the right. Yahoo retained about half of all the political emails in inbox (up to 55.2% marked as spam) while outlook filtered out the vast majority of emails (over 71.8%) from all political candidates and marked them as spam," the proposed methodology section continued. "Gmail, however, retained the majority of left-wing candidate emails in inbox (< 10.12% marked as spam) while sent the majority of right-wing candidate emails to the spam folder (up to 77.2% marked as spam)."

The study "further observed that the percentage of emails marked by Gmail as spam from the right-wing candidates grew steadily as the election date approached while the percentage of emails marked as spam from the left-wing candidates remained about the same" in the days leading up to Election Day. 

The study, conducted by Hassan Iqbal, Usman Mahmood Khan, Hassan Ali Khan and Muhammad Shahzad, aimed to determine whether email services exhibit aggregate political biases, treat similar emails from senders with different political affiliations in the same way, if the interactions of the users with their email accounts, such as reading emails, impact the political biases of SFAs and whether SFAs exhibit different political biases for recipients belonging to different demographic. 

Google dismissed the group’s findings. 

"Political affiliation has absolutely no bearing on mail classifications in Gmail and we've debunked this suggestion, which has surfaced periodically from across the political spectrum, for many years. Mail classifications in Gmail automatically adjust to match Gmail users' preferences and actions. Gmail users can move messages to spam, or to any other category. Gmail automatically adjusts the classifications of particular emails according to these user actions," a Google spokesperson told Fox News Digital. 

The study indicates that spam is largely defined as "unsolicited email that comes from an entity that the recipient is not already aware of or has no interest in knowing about," but Google defines it as "any content that is unwanted by the user." 

"This is significantly different from the criteria proposed by the previous research in that the spam email does not have to meet any of the explicitly defined conditions so long as there is a reason to believe that the email may be unwanted by the recipient," the authors wrote. 

The researchers noted that researchers have studied SFAs in the past and have identified five types of features that appear to influence the decisions of SFAs, including the metadata about email content, the actual content of the email, the reaction of the recipient, the attributes of the sender and the demographics of the recipient. 

"The spam filtering algorithms (SFAs) in the widely-used email services of today such as Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo do not provide any transparency on their internal workings. Given the lack of this transparency, an important question to study is whether these SFAs hold any biases towards certain political affiliations," the researchers wrote. "This question is motivated by the growing body of evidence suggesting that the biases in online algorithms can influence undecided voters. For example, Epstein et al. showed that the bias in search rankings can shift the voting preferences of the undecided voters by as much as 20% without those voters being aware of the manipulation." 

...

Google’s extremely popular email service was found to be overwhelmingly in favor of content from liberal candidates. 

"We further observe that Gmail marks a significantly higher percentage (67.6%) of emails from the right as spam compared to the emails from left (just 8.2%)" researchers wrote. "Gmail marked 59.3% more emails from the right candidates as spam compared to the left candidates." 

The group also found that in "Gmail and Yahoo, the number of emails from the left and from the right have a noticeable influence on the percentages of their emails marked as spam. However, such influence is not seen in the case of Outlook."

Researchers were unable to find "consistent actions that one could recommend to users to help them reduce the bias in the way the SFA treats political emails" that are sent to them. 

Read full article by Brian Flood, Fox News