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My home state’s (Texas) online ballot printing site for small counties got its mails to my GMail sent to spam in 2018 and 2020, and not even that far in 2022.

That domain doesn’t have SPF or DKIM configured, and the link to click for generating the ballot is HTTP and an IP address (not even a proper DNS name), so no wonder.

However, I’d expect those mails to be delivered anyway since I marked the address as safe each time, but here we are.



>However, I’d expect those mails to be delivered anyway since I marked the address as safe each time, but here we are.

Exactly - this is the biggest thing for me. I understand that some mail may erroneously be identified as spam, but when I explicitly mark it as Not Spam, I would expect my mail provider to respect that decision (for my inbox personally, at least).

I had a re-occuring issue where the payment receipt from my small gym kept going to spam. I think after marking it Not Spam for like 6 months it eventually started appearing in the Inbox sportatically.


"Safe" and "Spam" buttons in Gmail are like the button on a crosswalk. Sometimes they do something, sometimes they're not even hooked up.


And just like even the buttons that work are prioritizing cars potentially five miles away, they were never intended for your benefit in the first place.


but there is no ownership of the mail sender, so how would it know if its the same mail sender?


> However, I’d expect those mails to be delivered anyway since I marked the address as safe each time, but here we are.

Presumably if there's no SPF or DKIM, then it's impossible for Gmail to verify that the mail has actually come from the address you whitelisted. It could just as easily be a phishing scam. IMO it's quite reasonable to reject such mail by default.


The same ip would have been used in both cases and the person receiving is logged in and can connect the mark safe event and the incoming email.




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