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Here's an idea: if politicians want to get past the spam filter, why not try being less spammy? How about not sharing my email with every other politician in the same party when I donate to you once? How about not using the Unicode mathematical bold characters in your subject line? How about not sending me 3 emails per week? These things go straight to spam because they are spam.

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In the US, if you donate over $200 the donation is public record. That record can be associated with any number of marketing databases to figure out how to get in contact with you. Also, politicians trade lists sometimes - that's a thing too.

You'd prefer that the rules of the scheme forbid address sharing, right? You're in luck: They do. Also you have to click explicitly that you want the mail from each particular campaign, and if 5% of people report a campaign's mail as spam, that campaign loses access to the scheme. (For a week the first time.)

But inventive unicode is allowed.

All I know is that I donate $15 to some race one time using a unique email address and then get all kinds of spam at that email address from other politicians I've never heard of. Something is fishy there.

That would get those other politicians booted from the gmail scheme. ("Would" rather than "will" because so far, noone has signed up. The thing starts officially in a few days.)

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