We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

chmod775

Chances are the e-mails they've been sending so far went unread/got moved to spam by a lot of users and Gmail took that as a signal. I send nothing but password-reset mails and never had an issue getting anything delivered, even though people constantly whine that delivering e-mail yourself has gotten so hard nowadays. Just got a clean IP and don't send crap.

rokkamokka

Does anyone want these emails? Users getting them might just be marking them as spam because they're unwanted

fontain

You are not penalized for sending infrequently but sending infrequently lessens the chance that your recipients will remember you and remember why they subscribed to your emails and if they don’t remember, they mark as spam. The problem for Font Awesome is 2 fold: 1. Kickstarter spam is a huge problem, seriously, it is so prevalent I expect gmail may even have specific rules around it. There is an entire cottage industry of kickstarter “promoters” that send out so much spam. 2. Font Awesome… is not a kickstarter? They’re using their email list to advertise a new project, Build Awesome. Same team, similar ethos, sure, but it is entirely new — they are sending email about a project to people who didn’t subscribe to email about that project. Who knows why specifically their email performance is so bad, but this blog post doesn’t come close to providing plausible explanations.

Pikamander2

Gmail's spam detection has some real headscratcher moments every now and then. Some days it'll mark legitimate transaction emails from major companies as spam even if you've been receiving emails from them for years. And then right afterwards it'll allow an obvious scam email with a PDF attachment from some random Gmail account that you've never contacted to go straight to your inbox.

sho_hn

If I read this right, they used their email recipient list from Font Awesome to spam people with an unrelated new product announcement. I get they're going for the whole "look at big evil Google undermining this underdog" support ticket route, but I think it will backfire in this case.

Youden

How do you get email addresses? Do people freely and explicitly choose to sign up to your mailing list, or is it baggage that you're forcing on them without their consent? I notice that when I go to https://fontawesome.com/ and click "Start for Free", I'm asked for my email address. This isn't necessary for me to use the icons. I just need a page that tells me to add the necessary tags for cdnjs [0]. I think your problem is dissonance between what you think your users want and what they actually want. If I had to sign up for a mailing list in order to use every frontend development library I've ever used, and their emails actually made it past my spam filter, I'd never see anything else. I think Google's doing the right thing here. You need to separate your newsletter and product updates from people who just want to set up the icons and move on with their lives. [0]: https://cdnjs.com/libraries/font-awesome

the__alchemist

#1: Was this article written by an LLM? The phrasing implies there's a high chance #2: Is your company sending spam emails? I don't know how Gmail's system works, but I will mark any unsolicited email from businesses as spam. Perhaps Google uses that as a heuristic?

j16sdiz

No. Thanks. Your "fun" email belongs to my spam box. I use font awesome for a few quick icons. I have no interested in using a new site engine. If you are getting new icons - great. not that interesting, but this is not spam. If you are doing a incompatible update - i hate this. but i need to know this. thanks for telling me. Doing a new kickstarter project? - no. hell no. this is not what i signed up for.

powera

From March, also https://blog.fontawesome.com/we-have-a-99-email-reputation-g... is the canonical URL.

0x3f

I'm a Font Awesome subscriber and yes, for the record, they spam me with annoying marketing and probably deserve their Gmail woes. They also use that silly dark pattern where they alternate sending out marketing emails from {David,Harry,Sam,Janet,every other person at the company}@fontawesome.com.

vachina

From a user’s PoV. Gmail is awesome. Super low noise and zero phishing emails.

apitman

It's pretty amazing email hasn't been replaced, or at least joined, by an open protocol where you can't message someone without first being approved by them, either directly like Facebook messenger or through some sort of referral system.

stackghost

>It’s a genuine catch-22: send too many emails and your reputation drops from complaints. Send too few and it drops from inactivity. Try to do the right thing and you get penalized either way. And. It. Is. Frustrating. What's frustrating is when companies delude themselves into thinking users want their spam in our inboxes. Perhaps a dose of perspective is required: The product is pretty icons for websites. No offense but the unvarnished truth is that on the list of "things that deserve my limited time and attention", whether or not font awesome has a new update is wayyy down near the bottom. Expecting users to give a flying shit when Gmail blocks your spam is naive at best.

rozumem

What's your spam report rate on Google Postmaster Tools?

airstrike

As a builder, I appreciate the hustle. But an e-mail every 2 months seems innocuous until you factor in how many senders one normally has, which really means lots of "exciting news"... that are actually only really exciting for the people who sent them. In an ideal world, I'd receive zero of those. I can just find out about things organically. I don't think I've ever wished to receive a single e-mail about icons—or from any library I use, tbh

SAI_Peregrinus

Opt-out is not consent. If I didn't opt in, I mark it as spam.

basilikum

Why is this blog on a sudomain of wpcomstaging.com? Is this actually an official site by fontawsome? If yes, what a pack of clowns. I hope their spam emails rot in every spam filter forever.

layer8

Better link: https://blog.fontawesome.com/we-have-a-99-email-reputation-g...

bar000n

I can understand the frustration but let's face it: you cannot fool huge email providers such as Gmail. They have huge userbases and if their users mark some of your messages as spam then you're screwed. I am email admin since 2003 and I have real email users, i don't take customers who send any sort of automated messages, and I never had any issues besides the occasional compromised mailbox once in a while, and that was way back in the day...

dwedge

Oh man another spammer complaining about spam filters. You are the reason email sucks, the rest of us can complain about you