A federal appeals court on Friday refused to reinstate the Republican National Committee’s claims that in 2022 Google wrongly sent fundraising messages into Gmail users’ spam filters.

The ruling, issued by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, came in a dispute dating to October 2022, when the political organization sued Google for allegedly disproportionately designating Republican fundraising messages as spam.

The complaint referred to a North Carolina State University study that found Gmail flags around 68% of Republican campaign emails as spam, compared to 8% Democratic campaign emails. (The organization says the “mass relegation” of its emails to Gmail spam folders stopped in October 2022, after it filed suit.)

Google denied filtering emails for political reasons, arguing that its anti-spam technology aims to make the product better for users, and doesn’t designate mail as spam for partisan purposes.

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