Political emails tend to get tagged as spam in general. I have someone close to me who is involved in local Democratic Party and progressive organizations. When you go to an event or donate money (say an award banquet), they share your name and spam the crap out of you. A lot of that mail gets tagged as spam as a result.

Conservative outlets work similarly, but they seem to have bigger online operations and are hard to get out of. My in laws get barraged with this stuff, and a mail provider like GMail or Microsoft gets a lot of spam signals from it I’m sure.

Political emails are spam. No matter from which direction they come from. So tagging them as spam seems just the right thing to do.

Political emails often are spam but not all of them. I subscribed to few newsletters from various political parties and I don't want google to block them from me.

It's only spam, if you don't want it.

If you explicitly solicit those emails, eg by signing up to a newsletter, it's not spam.

Some of the conservative emails I did not opt in, so could be considered spam. Others I did opt in and it still gets sent to spam.

On the other hand I get unsolicited email from some Democrat groups, and I never see such emails in spam.

I'm liberal, and lots of the unsolicited Democrat emails go to my spam folder.

I've heard people in the political world talk about buying and selling email lists, which I thought was illegal, but seems to be common practice.

In the early 90's I gave something like $20 to the Sierra Club or a similar group. After a deluge in physical mail asking for donations from around the political spectrum, I never did it again. I left no forwarding address after moving either. Pretty dumb on their part, they traded all their goodwill for a short-term dollar.

Is it doing that because they are “conservative emails” or because they violate spam rules?

If those emails are flagged because they’re “conservative” then I agree with you that needs to he corrected.

However, if those emails are flagged because they violate well known spam rules then let’s help “conservative” email senders to follow the rules. Examples include not using single or double opt-in for signup, not honoring or providing an opt-out link, using emails from a bulk list that includes known flagged emails, not including a plain text copy of the email in the message, and originating from a flagged server. Reputable email services like MailChimp go to great lengths to educate email list admins how to follow these rules & curate high value email lists.

Needs to be more specific as well. Is it intelligent conservatism in the vein of Bill Buckley or a knuckle-dragging ad hominem attacks from the lowbrow right?

Gmail thankfully sends all the republican and democratic party emails I receive straight to spam.

One year, I made a concerted effort to troll some friends by getting them bumper stickers from the opposing party that they supported (e.g. dems got republican bumper stickers, repubs got democrat bumper stickers).

Since then, despite being sure to opt out of mails at the time of purchase, and clicking 'unsubscribe' numerous times, both parties continue to spam me.

Gmail filters these emails into spam for me. Thank goodness.

I'm led to believe that if enough gmail users mark emails as spam, this will get fed across to other users that haven't. So you can probably blame people like me for marking these messages as spam, for it occurring to you.

Or y'know, they could actually honor the 'unsubscribe' request and stop spamming me, and I wouldn't have to mark it (legitimately) as spam.

Then it doesn't censor your email at all.

You can freely view the emails in your spam folder, with one click. You can optionally move the emails to your inbox and train Gmail ("not spam" button) not to place them there in the future.

It's going too far to call it censorship (in any manner) when an email provider places an email into a spam folder that requires one click to view/review.

A lot of overt spam (when gmail is most certain that it's spam) doesn't end up in the spam folder. A counter is incremented and the message is thrown out.

Unless you are talking about email coming from the most blacklisted of IPs, that’s not true.

It's not censorship. It's basic hygiene.