I've commented here before that it is obvious to me that gmail makes no effort to combat spam anymore given that unsubscribe links are legally required and generally present for spam in the US and are an obvious heuristic that aren't used. I would expect basically any trained filter to pick up on it, so my assumption is that they actually intentionally have rules to allow spam.
I get emails that literally say "This is an email advertisement". These are presumably being blasted out to tons of mailboxes. How does a model not notice this?
An advertisement is only spam if it's unsolicited. If you forget to uncheck the box "yes send me promotional offers and deals" when signing up it's not spam according to that definition.
If you're making people opt-out and setting them up to "forget" to do so, then you are spamming them, but even under that definition, I'd estimate that over 99% of what I'm calling spam still qualifies. A large amount of it is from businesses I've never interacted with, so obviously unsolicited.
Isnt it against GDPR and they could get hit with large fines in Europe for every recipient?
A mail service run by an advertising company fails to filter out advertising emails? I'm shocked. Shocked!