It's always campaign season in the United States, but we bet you're feeling pretty good about the 2022 election cycle finally being over. And there's even more good news to go along with that: Google is set to wrap up a pilot program that allowed candidates for office and political action committees to circumvent Gmail's usual spam filters and, thus, exposing more users to their contents.

As a refresher, Google is the subject of both a complaint to the Federal Election Commission and a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee. The organization claims Gmail filters out more messages from Republicans than Democrats which amounts to systematic ideological bias and an in-kind contribution to Democrats.

Google proposed the Gmail pilot program to the FEC in June to prove it wasn't putting its finger on the political scales — the company only tagged permitted advertising messages with a prominent button for recipients to unsubscribe — to which the agency agreed. It's been running the program since September.

So, how did things go? Well, while only the participating campaigns, Google, and the FEC know the exact numbers, it seems the commission is satisfied with the lack of bias Gmail has shown. In a letter from the FEC to Google dated January 11, CNN reports that the agency agreed with the company's claim that the filters fulfill commercial and not ideological interests in protecting users from scams, malware, phishing attacks, and all sorts of undesired messages in general.

On Monday, Google filed a motion to dismiss the RNC's lawsuit with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California. The company notes in its paperwork that it is scheduled to wrap up the Gmail pilot program on January 31.

Among its legal arguments, the company addressed data brought by the RNC in a study out of North Carolina State University (PDF via Arxiv) which showed a political discrepancy in Gmail's spam folder placements, pointing out that one of the authors disclosed in an interview with The Washington Post that while the study did find some sort of structural factor in Republican messages that Gmail's spam filters consistently caught onto, it did not find an explicit motivational bias on Google's part. The study also did not account for user preferences which, the researcher admits, zeroed out the discrepancy between Republicans and Democrats entirely.

While the larger story has months to run yet in court, Gmail users will be able to stop worrying about campaign pitches that attempt to claw at their wallets for donations. Also, they (meaning you) can also step up their filtering game.