Judge dismisses RNC lawsuit against Google

Last year, Republicans sued Google, alleging that Gmail improperly filters their donation messages to the spam folder. Less than 12 months later, everything is basically done.

US District Court Judge Daniel Calabretta dismissed the Republican National Committee’s lawsuit Thursday, according to the Washington Post. According to Calabretta, it was a “close case” but there was insufficient evidence on the part of the RNC that Google acted in bad faith. According to the Post, Calabretta allowed the RNC to amend and resubmit the case, which the organization agreed to do.

In case you missed the lawsuit when it first surfaced last October, the specific allegation was that conservative fundraising emails are sent to Gmail’s spam filter more often than liberal ones. The basis was a study by North Carolina State University, whose authors later claimed that Republicans had taken the results out of context.

Mashable did some of our own reports on the subject and found that Gmail spam filtering has a lot more to do with sender behavior than political affiliation. In short, if you send a lot of unopened emails in a short period of time, the chances of them ending up in the spam folder increase. It’s not hard to imagine what happens to those fundraising emails.