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.
I don’t know if this is true with Font Awesome, but more and more companies are spamming my inbox despite disabling any promotional emails in their settings.
So, I mark any unwanted email as spam in Gmail immediately, and even leave bad reviews.
Having my email address is not the same as having my consent. Stop trying to roofie us with malicious EULAs.
I remember there was a thread some years back with an article complaining that you get emails immediately on sign up, but that it can take up to 10 days to stop receiving emails when you unsubscribe.
One spammer said they could use the same servers for both but when you unsubscribe you have immediately signaled that you are now losing him money. So he uses the slowest cheapest part of the stack for removal. He will never fix it and doesn't care if you get some more spam after you unsubscribe since he has done the bare minimum.
If I get a single email after I've unsubscribed I go back in my inbox and mark every single email I ever received as spam.
It's the same with app notifications. I get a new app and it asks to turn on notifications. I need to get timely updates on stuff happening in the app so I click yes. Suddenly every day my phone's notification drawer is just full of spam from that app that is not relevant to what I actually need the app for. For most legit apps, they'll break out the notifications settings so you can turn off the marketing stream but leave on the critical stream.
Do you know how exceedingly hard it is to grow a business and how shameless you have to be in the face of adversity to make it work?
It sucks. You have to do this stuff to get a customer relationship. The thing Apple and Google get for free and try so hard to snip you out of.
Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if we regulated market monopolies and caused them to break up. More money to go around.
Font Awesome is a good business, but you know the gettings are tough when they have to do this.
A lot of y'all complain about this, then act surprised when businesses have to lay off or go under. We can't all be advertising behemoths like Google.
Google, which by the way, used monopoly power to take 92% of "URL bars" and turn them into proxy bidding wars for brands and trademarks they do not own. Totally illegal horse shit that passes costs onto consumers and makes it easier for big business to squash small brands (I've had big business spend ads on my tiny little trademark).
I am an entrepeneur, not an employee. Never took VC money, boostrapped from very little. They're right though. Yes, Apple and Google need to be broken up. No, you absolutely don't need to be shameless and send spam emails to make it work. You don't need to spend money on Google Ads either.
I understand the sentiment and know how hard it is to advance in business especially within all the noise.
However, that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want to be spammed and will even use the nuclear option and delete my account completely if spamming continues.
Your customers are not your minions, some would accept such communication and some would refuse. Tricking users into receiving emails will not work in the long term if your products suck.
A consumer will pay $10/mo and ask for the moon. Threaten to leave. Get angry at an email.
A business will drop $10k no questions asked and your product can be garbage. As long as it solves or attempts to solve a pain point. Emails won't be seen as spam. Except by ICs/eng, perhaps.
> But here’s the part that really gets us. At our CORE, our instinct is to only email folks when we actually have something fun to share. A big release, something we’re excited about, news worth your time.
I would prefer not to give my email address to a company that thinks that this should give them a good email reputation. If you email me because you are excited and I’m not, I probably think of it as spam.
It's actually worse. I just signed up with a dummy email and the page says they need your email to create an account so, they can store the icon kits you've created. That kinda makes sense. But at no point do they ask you whether you want to subscribe to any form of newsletter. AFAICT not even the privacy policy mentions anything about that. You're just subscribed automatically. So by definition anything not crucial for creating the account is literal spam. I'm not even sure that's legal under GDPR.
But the thing that might actually be killing their reputation is that their mails seemingly come from different emails all looking like bounces+18741050-ecba-jopudmulwqqsumjwub=nespj.com@email.fontawesome.com. But even worse than that, the "confirm your email" email and the following "finish account setup" email came from two different sub-domains. Maybe this is just a new attempt to get around Google's spam filter, but it seems like the worst thing you could possibly do when sending emails.
> But even worse than that, the "confirm your email" email and the following "finish account setup" email came from two different sub-domains. Maybe this is just a new attempt to get around Google's spam filter, but it seems like the worst thing you could possibly do when sending emails.
Standard advice is to use one subdomain for "transaction" email (verification, invoices) and another for marketing
And I would definitely mark these emails as spam. When a company sends me emails I don't want, I mark them as spam. I don't care about the technical rules or if you tricked me into wherein. If it's unwanted non-transactional email, it's spam and you deserve to be kicked off the global email network. You may think you're sending only one email a week so you're fine. Cool, well my inbox gets one "technically compliant" spam email per hour and you have equal responsibility to all the rest of them.
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.
Each email has an unsubscribe link, but my problem is that I don't know if these separate senders represent different email lists. In the past, some companies who've used this pattern have accepted my unsubscribe request on one list, but kept emailing me from another, as if I'm supposed to work out their marketing email list hierarchy in order to stop them spamming me. So these days I don't bother, I just select all and mark as spam when I see it.
I think most of them are spamming you and you’re being nice to attribute to mistakes.
Also, a lot of companies nowadays keep adding weird email topics that you need to constantly unsubscribe from.
If I signed up and turned off all subscriptions, then anything they send is marked as spam immediately. The lack of cost in sending email makes it easy for them to keep abusing all the time.
I basically give companies 0 strikes anymore, and assume the "unsubscribe" link is at best, a dark pattern that only unsubscribes me from that 1 out of their 100 "channels," and at worst, confirms my E-mail address. "Report Spam" immediately.
Oh the 'real name' thing I see all the time, often just using the founder's name, but only the more growth-hacky companies seem to purposely cycle through the names of their other employees for sending marketing content.
Yeah I hate spam so much, hope everyone here reports them as spam to give them a lesson to not pretend to be the good guys when they are spammers.
Hey fontawesome and any other company that sends bullshit spam, nobody cares about whatever thing you want to spam, you're just poisoning the well for others.
> At our CORE, our instinct is to only email folks when we actually have something fun to share. A big release, something we’re excited about, news worth your time. That’d probably be every couple of months, if that. Respectful. Low noise.
Low noise for some fonts is zero emails. In the nicest way possible, users aren't excited about your big release, they're just not.
Zero emails is not low noise - it's zero noise. I agree that I sometimes want zero noise from companies whose products I am using...and also it depends on what is in the noise? Sometimes I find unexpected signal.
I would say that email is inherently a somewhat noisy channel. You have little meta-data about how appropriate and timely a message is, so often you are sending in the dark. There are many downsides to the protocol and its place in our lives but it does carry a lot of important communication.
Basically...I just don't know what communication medium would allow a company that makes app icons to keep their customers in the loop about updates & concerns related to the product. Are you gonna install a Font Awesome app?
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...
In my experience they will mark your e-mails as spam for no sound reason at all. I run my own MX, for myself personally, and my e-mails to friends using Gmail regularly gets classed as spam as soon as it's been "long enough" since my last mail. My MX does everything by the books, ticks all the boxes, never ended up on any DNSBL etc. Their behavior is effectively a form of systemic sabotage.
Yes absolutely this. I've put so much effort into making sure I tick all the boxes and yet I constantly wonder if my email is getting delivered. This feels anti competitive to me. It's Google constantly telling me, give up, you know deep down you should just use Gmail.
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
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.
#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?
Gmail has a system of reputation as you suggest. It is very likely that enough people marked their emails as spam, which the OOP could figure out on the postmaster dashboard if they were so inclined: https://postmaster.google.com/managedomains
It also goes the other way, if enough people click "not spam" and interact with your mails, your reputation gets better. I'm currently trying to do that with my personal email/domain - will probably take some time though. For now, my friends say my mails land in spam even though I get a 10/10 score on mail-tester.com and similar sites.
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.
Several years back when I applied for a Google internship, I missed some emails from my recruiter (soandso@google.com) because they went to my gmail spam folder.
There is a good reason for this. Part of Google maintains the principle that their own traffic has to go through the same classification process as all other mails. Other parts of Google can't stop themselves from sending spam from what are supposed to be gold-plated VIPs. Consequently, some of Google's own behaviors have poor reputation and some legitimate transactional messages are collateral damage.
I've recently switched my personal email to a brand new domain and am struggling with getting it delivered. And all I'm doing is ~100 emails a week hand written by me to other individuals. I've been doing Internet email for 35 years now, I used to handwrite sendmail.cf for my college. I'm worried the medium is going to fail entirely in 5-10 years because of complexity in spam fighting.
Receiving mail: I was using Google Workspace to accept email to my domain and then forward it to my personal @gmail.com address. And Gmail was blocking emails forwarded from Google Workspace. Not because the original email was suspect, no, but because Google Workspace isn't forwarding email correctly (ARC or SRS related) and so the SPF check failed. The solution for that was to use Cloudflare to forward my incoming email instead. They are doing ARC right, or in some other ways the signatures arrive intact so Gmail sees valid SPF instead of invalid. Now my mail gets delivered reliably.
Sending mail: I only ever send mail to Gmail. I have DKIM set up and just set up a strict p=reject policy with DMARC. This seems to be working pretty well. I did have to add Cloudlflare as another authorized DKIM source so the mail forward works, but that's OK too.
Basically we've shifted the trust problem from "does this email look legit" to "do I trust the companies that are sending this email?" This all works only if Gmail and Cloudflare don't screw up and allow spam. (Which is already failing: I get a lot of Gmail spam.) So email is now consolidating into the hands of a few companies. It is not working well as a peer to peer Internet medium anymore.
Email subscriptions is and has always been the wrong way to go. If you want to provide a news subscription service, provide RSS. If you want to receive news about a particular service/company, subscribe to their RSS feeds. No reputations and delivery issue to handle for the provider, no subscriptions and unsubscriptions to manage for provider, can be managed locally by user. Providers have easy setup, users have full control. And RSS is supported by any half decent email client so people who like having stuff in the same interface do not have to use a different software.
That feels a bit weird to me. If you were sending emails about a kickstarter for a static website builder to a list that signed up for icon related news, you'll get marked as spam.
it's not lower than average participation. it is very high participation initially, and then nothing. lower than average participation would have meant that they take a long time to reach their goal. so to me the argument seems plausible.
My money is on the likelihood that most GMail users started marking these emails as spam, and GMail recognized that overriding trend and began to redirect the emails accordingly on a broader scale.
Essentially, the people FontAwesome thinks will want to hear about their new features have actually, collectively, said, "No thanks," and FontAwesome is struggling to accept that.
The reputation thing is bull by the way, you don't need to spam people continually to get your email delivered - otherwise every normal people would know this was true.
Of course you have an A+ reputation, the service assumes people want to receive your crap
This post rubs me the wrong way. Don't get me wrong, I'm a FA customer.
But this makes it seem like FA feels entitled to people's attention. Google is getting in the way of that, so they are complaining about the system.
Yes, unscrupulous opportunists + Google + AI (in that order) have rotted the email system into a byzantine husk of its former useful self, especially for promotion, but I don't understand why FA is making a fuss over this or should be accorded special treatment. Email sucks for everyone, maybe find other ways to get your message out?
GMail disagrees with you, because GMail users disagree with you. They are clicking "report spam" on your emails. Whether or not you think what you're sending is spam, the recipients think it is, and that's what matters. (Based on the other comments in this thread it's not hard to see why they might think so.)
Users definitely click "report spam" in large numbers on things that are not spam. At work we've long had problems of getting reported for spam when the only things we send are:
• A receipt when a person comes to our site and purchases something.
• Their license key if what they purchased requires a license key.
• Replies if they send email to customer support.
• If they have purchased an automatically renewing subscription we email a receipt after it renews or a notice that it was declined if the charge does not go through. This is required by the major credit card companies.
• If they have an automatically renewing subscription and they are on a plan other than monthly we send a reminder before it tries to renew. This is required by the major credit card companies and by the consumer protection laws in many jurisdictions.
Does "report not spam" do anything? A local business will send me a receipt from a gmail address, and every time it's marked as spam despite it telling me future mail from this address will not be tagged as spam.
It does add a weight to some internal classification tool. After a few times it should work, but it probably depends on a lot of other factors. (It's probably faster if other users also flag it as spam.)
For some annoying cases in which gmail never learns, I have filters that send them to spam directly. I also have two filters for my bank that sometimes send important stuff and other times they send a 10% discount in shavers in another city[emoji][emoji]!!
As much as I am thankful for the innovations Google has given us, we no longer prosecute monopolies where they are toxic unfortunately. The Federal government learned awhile back that it's much easier to manipulate one large company rather than a healthy ecosystem of small companies.
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.
which system does that? neither telegram, nor whatsapp do it, and it annoys the hell out of me. at least whatsapp tells me that the sender doesn't get a notification until i respond or add the contact. wechat actually requires a connection request before allowing you to message someone, with all the complaints about privacy, wechat has the better UX to avoid getting spammed, linkedin requires a connection too, if you don't have a pro account. i don't know about any others.
We had a similar problem in the university. At the beginning of the semester, the students have to register for a Moodle server with additional material. So when they create an account, we have to send a few thousands of confirmation emails in a short period out of the blue, that makes Gmail/Yahoo/Outlook/Whatever unhappy.
The solution was to ask the students to send an email to the server half an hour before registering. It's not ideal, but it adds us to a secret list of known contacts of the student, so (most) emails are delivered.
> we have to send a few thousands of confirmation emails
What are you confirming, and why do you have to send it as E-mail? If it's sign-ups, just "confirm" using the same system that the user used to sign-up. Presumably HTTP.
on most services you sign up by using an email address (or a phone number) as an identifier. these need to be verified to make sure it's actually yours and not someone else's, or a typo.
They don't need to be verified through E-mail or through the phone, though. A simple landing page after you sign up that says: "We signed up [E-mail] for this service using [phone number]. If this is incorrect, [click here] to make corrections" would work, too.
Frankly, I'm getting tired of having to constantly "verify" this and "confirm" that every time I sign up for or log into an online service. It's especially annoying after I've already signed up. Every bank that I haven't logged into for the last 5 milliseconds hits me with a "confirm your E-mail yet again" flow. I'm going to just start using "password" for my password if these guys keep insisting on round-tripping through my E-mail every time I need to do anything.
Well you can already do this with email, can't you? You just use [company-name]@[yourdomain].com. Or you+[company]@gmail.com. Then you either block all unknown, or more practically just block companies as soon as they start spamming you.
From your PoV maybe. I would be restless knowing that I may be silently losing important emails because they triggered some blackbox filter in such a way that they didn't even end up in my spam box...
If I did not explicitly opt-in to receiving emails, which I never do, I mark them as spam in Gmail. Stop sending unsolicited emails and you won’t be reported for spam, it’s pretty easy.
something is wrong with gmail filtering, I had no problems for years but now my custom domain emails go to spam when sending to people I've been emailing all the time...
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.
an old quote .... ".. having mastered the game of five card stud in the Pacific theater, the victorious Allies declare the game of Poker to be illegal"
People should really stop using GMail. Both for privacy reasons (Google is notorious on mining your email for targeted ads and for sharing data with the US government), and for anti-oligarchy/anti-trust reasons - that company controls much too muh of the activity on the Internet.
There are perfectly fine email providers - free + donations, for-small-fee, at-the-ISP, etc.
>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.
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
I don’t know if this is true with Font Awesome, but more and more companies are spamming my inbox despite disabling any promotional emails in their settings.
So, I mark any unwanted email as spam in Gmail immediately, and even leave bad reviews.
Having my email address is not the same as having my consent. Stop trying to roofie us with malicious EULAs.
I remember there was a thread some years back with an article complaining that you get emails immediately on sign up, but that it can take up to 10 days to stop receiving emails when you unsubscribe.
One spammer said they could use the same servers for both but when you unsubscribe you have immediately signaled that you are now losing him money. So he uses the slowest cheapest part of the stack for removal. He will never fix it and doesn't care if you get some more spam after you unsubscribe since he has done the bare minimum.
If I get a single email after I've unsubscribed I go back in my inbox and mark every single email I ever received as spam.
It's the same with app notifications. I get a new app and it asks to turn on notifications. I need to get timely updates on stuff happening in the app so I click yes. Suddenly every day my phone's notification drawer is just full of spam from that app that is not relevant to what I actually need the app for. For most legit apps, they'll break out the notifications settings so you can turn off the marketing stream but leave on the critical stream.
Apps like Rollo will complain on every launch that it cannot spam you with notifications if you don’t enable it.
Honda doesn’t let you find where your car is (which is a paid service) unless you share your precise location with them.
>more and more companies are spamming my inbox despite disabling any promotional emails in their settings.
The other trick I've noticed is companies will add new categories and default those on.
Are you an entrepreneur or an employee?
Do you know how exceedingly hard it is to grow a business and how shameless you have to be in the face of adversity to make it work?
It sucks. You have to do this stuff to get a customer relationship. The thing Apple and Google get for free and try so hard to snip you out of.
Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if we regulated market monopolies and caused them to break up. More money to go around.
Font Awesome is a good business, but you know the gettings are tough when they have to do this.
A lot of y'all complain about this, then act surprised when businesses have to lay off or go under. We can't all be advertising behemoths like Google.
Google, which by the way, used monopoly power to take 92% of "URL bars" and turn them into proxy bidding wars for brands and trademarks they do not own. Totally illegal horse shit that passes costs onto consumers and makes it easier for big business to squash small brands (I've had big business spend ads on my tiny little trademark).
You're all angry at the wrong people.
I am an entrepeneur, not an employee. Never took VC money, boostrapped from very little. They're right though. Yes, Apple and Google need to be broken up. No, you absolutely don't need to be shameless and send spam emails to make it work. You don't need to spend money on Google Ads either.
I understand the sentiment and know how hard it is to advance in business especially within all the noise.
However, that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want to be spammed and will even use the nuclear option and delete my account completely if spamming continues.
Your customers are not your minions, some would accept such communication and some would refuse. Tricking users into receiving emails will not work in the long term if your products suck.
so the only way to grow a business is to sell to people who tolerate spam and avoid those who don't?
They complain a lot less.
This is why B2B is easier than B2C.
A consumer will pay $10/mo and ask for the moon. Threaten to leave. Get angry at an email.
A business will drop $10k no questions asked and your product can be garbage. As long as it solves or attempts to solve a pain point. Emails won't be seen as spam. Except by ICs/eng, perhaps.
Who’s angry? We’re just not interested in someone else’s unethical and unwelcome business practices and are acting to curtail its impact.
Your dreams of business success aren’t my problem, and neither is your shamelessness.
Sending you an email after you signed up is unethical?
The world has gone mad.
No company has ever gained users by forcing emails on users.
Every fashion brand on the planet reengages their customers this way and it works.
I learned about the Analogue 64 from a marketing email, and I bought it.
I see emails showing me new API features are available. Sometimes that's useful.
I see Font Awesome has new fonts. Useful.
I see a16z wrote an article that seems interesting to me. Useful.
I filter out the 95% of stuff I don't want. I'm not seeing ads for clothing, but my wife might and she might find that useful.
You're thinking that because you don't like it the practice should end entirely across the board?
You very rarely make it in this world without trying.
And if you don't like it, there's "unsubscribe".
Not everyone is lucky enough to be Apple. And even they send lots of marketing emails.
Engineers complain too much. The reality on the ground is much more steep and treacherous.
Fun quote from the OP:
> But here’s the part that really gets us. At our CORE, our instinct is to only email folks when we actually have something fun to share. A big release, something we’re excited about, news worth your time.
I would prefer not to give my email address to a company that thinks that this should give them a good email reputation. If you email me because you are excited and I’m not, I probably think of it as spam.
It's actually worse. I just signed up with a dummy email and the page says they need your email to create an account so, they can store the icon kits you've created. That kinda makes sense. But at no point do they ask you whether you want to subscribe to any form of newsletter. AFAICT not even the privacy policy mentions anything about that. You're just subscribed automatically. So by definition anything not crucial for creating the account is literal spam. I'm not even sure that's legal under GDPR.
But the thing that might actually be killing their reputation is that their mails seemingly come from different emails all looking like bounces+18741050-ecba-jopudmulwqqsumjwub=nespj.com@email.fontawesome.com. But even worse than that, the "confirm your email" email and the following "finish account setup" email came from two different sub-domains. Maybe this is just a new attempt to get around Google's spam filter, but it seems like the worst thing you could possibly do when sending emails.
> But even worse than that, the "confirm your email" email and the following "finish account setup" email came from two different sub-domains. Maybe this is just a new attempt to get around Google's spam filter, but it seems like the worst thing you could possibly do when sending emails.
Standard advice is to use one subdomain for "transaction" email (verification, invoices) and another for marketing
https://www.twilio.com/docs/sendgrid/onboarding/email-api/ev...
And I would definitely mark these emails as spam. When a company sends me emails I don't want, I mark them as spam. I don't care about the technical rules or if you tricked me into wherein. If it's unwanted non-transactional email, it's spam and you deserve to be kicked off the global email network. You may think you're sending only one email a week so you're fine. Cool, well my inbox gets one "technically compliant" spam email per hour and you have equal responsibility to all the rest of them.
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.
Do they have an easy-to-unsubscribe link in the marketing spam (cannot include logging into the user's account)?
I have a generic name gmail account and people with my name frequently accidentally use my email address when signing up for stuff.
When I get unsolicited mail which doesn't include a simple unsubscribe link then I just report as spam instead.
Each email has an unsubscribe link, but my problem is that I don't know if these separate senders represent different email lists. In the past, some companies who've used this pattern have accepted my unsubscribe request on one list, but kept emailing me from another, as if I'm supposed to work out their marketing email list hierarchy in order to stop them spamming me. So these days I don't bother, I just select all and mark as spam when I see it.
I think most of them are spamming you and you’re being nice to attribute to mistakes.
Also, a lot of companies nowadays keep adding weird email topics that you need to constantly unsubscribe from.
If I signed up and turned off all subscriptions, then anything they send is marked as spam immediately. The lack of cost in sending email makes it easy for them to keep abusing all the time.
I basically give companies 0 strikes anymore, and assume the "unsubscribe" link is at best, a dark pattern that only unsubscribes me from that 1 out of their 100 "channels," and at worst, confirms my E-mail address. "Report Spam" immediately.
> Do they have an easy-to-unsubscribe link in the marketing spam
I've noticed a recent trend where unsubscribing actually does nothing
Wouldn't be a fringe. I get most marketing emails with a name as if a person sent it.
Catchy subject seemingly target to me. Same for content.
But you are right, it's more likely enough users marked them as spam that Google algorithm decided the source is the spam.
Oh the 'real name' thing I see all the time, often just using the founder's name, but only the more growth-hacky companies seem to purposely cycle through the names of their other employees for sending marketing content.
Yeah I hate spam so much, hope everyone here reports them as spam to give them a lesson to not pretend to be the good guys when they are spammers.
Hey fontawesome and any other company that sends bullshit spam, nobody cares about whatever thing you want to spam, you're just poisoning the well for others.
> At our CORE, our instinct is to only email folks when we actually have something fun to share. A big release, something we’re excited about, news worth your time. That’d probably be every couple of months, if that. Respectful. Low noise.
Low noise for some fonts is zero emails. In the nicest way possible, users aren't excited about your big release, they're just not.
Zero emails is not low noise - it's zero noise. I agree that I sometimes want zero noise from companies whose products I am using...and also it depends on what is in the noise? Sometimes I find unexpected signal.
I would say that email is inherently a somewhat noisy channel. You have little meta-data about how appropriate and timely a message is, so often you are sending in the dark. There are many downsides to the protocol and its place in our lives but it does carry a lot of important communication.
Basically...I just don't know what communication medium would allow a company that makes app icons to keep their customers in the loop about updates & concerns related to the product. Are you gonna install a Font Awesome app?
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...
In my experience they will mark your e-mails as spam for no sound reason at all. I run my own MX, for myself personally, and my e-mails to friends using Gmail regularly gets classed as spam as soon as it's been "long enough" since my last mail. My MX does everything by the books, ticks all the boxes, never ended up on any DNSBL etc. Their behavior is effectively a form of systemic sabotage.
Yes absolutely this. I've put so much effort into making sure I tick all the boxes and yet I constantly wonder if my email is getting delivered. This feels anti competitive to me. It's Google constantly telling me, give up, you know deep down you should just use Gmail.
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.
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
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.
#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?
Gmail has a system of reputation as you suggest. It is very likely that enough people marked their emails as spam, which the OOP could figure out on the postmaster dashboard if they were so inclined: https://postmaster.google.com/managedomains
It also goes the other way, if enough people click "not spam" and interact with your mails, your reputation gets better. I'm currently trying to do that with my personal email/domain - will probably take some time though. For now, my friends say my mails land in spam even though I get a 10/10 score on mail-tester.com and similar sites.
Yes, it was. Recent Claudes absolutely love to spam an endless stream of very short sentences like this.
Totally sounds like an LLM wrote it. Should have been two paragraphs instead of this verbose drivel.
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.
Several years back when I applied for a Google internship, I missed some emails from my recruiter (soandso@google.com) because they went to my gmail spam folder.
There is a good reason for this. Part of Google maintains the principle that their own traffic has to go through the same classification process as all other mails. Other parts of Google can't stop themselves from sending spam from what are supposed to be gold-plated VIPs. Consequently, some of Google's own behaviors have poor reputation and some legitimate transactional messages are collateral damage.
> Other parts of Google can't stop themselves from sending spam from what are supposed to be gold-plated VIPs.
Seems like a badly run company.
(Insert that caricature of the MSFT org chart with guns pointing in all directions.)
at that scale i don't believe it is possible to do much better on this particular issue at least.
It's gotten to the point that I don't open emails from Sendgrid support because 4 out of 5 are poorly disguised phishing attempts.
I've recently switched my personal email to a brand new domain and am struggling with getting it delivered. And all I'm doing is ~100 emails a week hand written by me to other individuals. I've been doing Internet email for 35 years now, I used to handwrite sendmail.cf for my college. I'm worried the medium is going to fail entirely in 5-10 years because of complexity in spam fighting.
Receiving mail: I was using Google Workspace to accept email to my domain and then forward it to my personal @gmail.com address. And Gmail was blocking emails forwarded from Google Workspace. Not because the original email was suspect, no, but because Google Workspace isn't forwarding email correctly (ARC or SRS related) and so the SPF check failed. The solution for that was to use Cloudflare to forward my incoming email instead. They are doing ARC right, or in some other ways the signatures arrive intact so Gmail sees valid SPF instead of invalid. Now my mail gets delivered reliably.
Sending mail: I only ever send mail to Gmail. I have DKIM set up and just set up a strict p=reject policy with DMARC. This seems to be working pretty well. I did have to add Cloudlflare as another authorized DKIM source so the mail forward works, but that's OK too.
Basically we've shifted the trust problem from "does this email look legit" to "do I trust the companies that are sending this email?" This all works only if Gmail and Cloudflare don't screw up and allow spam. (Which is already failing: I get a lot of Gmail spam.) So email is now consolidating into the hands of a few companies. It is not working well as a peer to peer Internet medium anymore.
Email subscriptions is and has always been the wrong way to go. If you want to provide a news subscription service, provide RSS. If you want to receive news about a particular service/company, subscribe to their RSS feeds. No reputations and delivery issue to handle for the provider, no subscriptions and unsubscriptions to manage for provider, can be managed locally by user. Providers have easy setup, users have full control. And RSS is supported by any half decent email client so people who like having stuff in the same interface do not have to use a different software.
What's not to like?
Who actually uses RSS compared to email? 1% of your customers?
Are these customers really interested in receiving mail or have they been subscribed through deceiving tactics by forgetting to uncheck a checkbox?
Opt-out is not consent. If I didn't opt in, I mark it as spam.
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.
The official blog is here: https://blog.fontawesome.com/we-have-a-99-email-reputation-g...
They seem to attribute lower-than-average participation in their kickstarter campaign for Build Awesome to this: https://blogfontawesome.wpcomstaging.com/pausing-kickstarter...
That feels a bit weird to me. If you were sending emails about a kickstarter for a static website builder to a list that signed up for icon related news, you'll get marked as spam.
it's not lower than average participation. it is very high participation initially, and then nothing. lower than average participation would have meant that they take a long time to reach their goal. so to me the argument seems plausible.
Better link: https://blog.fontawesome.com/we-have-a-99-email-reputation-g...
Does anyone want these emails? Users getting them might just be marking them as spam because they're unwanted
My money is on the likelihood that most GMail users started marking these emails as spam, and GMail recognized that overriding trend and began to redirect the emails accordingly on a broader scale.
Essentially, the people FontAwesome thinks will want to hear about their new features have actually, collectively, said, "No thanks," and FontAwesome is struggling to accept that.
>Right before we hit send on our announcement emails for our new Build Awesome Kickstarter campaign... This is spam.
The reputation thing is bull by the way, you don't need to spam people continually to get your email delivered - otherwise every normal people would know this was true.
Of course you have an A+ reputation, the service assumes people want to receive your crap
This post rubs me the wrong way. Don't get me wrong, I'm a FA customer.
But this makes it seem like FA feels entitled to people's attention. Google is getting in the way of that, so they are complaining about the system.
Yes, unscrupulous opportunists + Google + AI (in that order) have rotted the email system into a byzantine husk of its former useful self, especially for promotion, but I don't understand why FA is making a fuss over this or should be accorded special treatment. Email sucks for everyone, maybe find other ways to get your message out?
GMail disagrees with you, because GMail users disagree with you. They are clicking "report spam" on your emails. Whether or not you think what you're sending is spam, the recipients think it is, and that's what matters. (Based on the other comments in this thread it's not hard to see why they might think so.)
Users definitely click "report spam" in large numbers on things that are not spam. At work we've long had problems of getting reported for spam when the only things we send are:
• A receipt when a person comes to our site and purchases something.
• Their license key if what they purchased requires a license key.
• Replies if they send email to customer support.
• If they have purchased an automatically renewing subscription we email a receipt after it renews or a notice that it was declined if the charge does not go through. This is required by the major credit card companies.
• If they have an automatically renewing subscription and they are on a plan other than monthly we send a reminder before it tries to renew. This is required by the major credit card companies and by the consumer protection laws in many jurisdictions.
Does "report not spam" do anything? A local business will send me a receipt from a gmail address, and every time it's marked as spam despite it telling me future mail from this address will not be tagged as spam.
It does add a weight to some internal classification tool. After a few times it should work, but it probably depends on a lot of other factors. (It's probably faster if other users also flag it as spam.)
For some annoying cases in which gmail never learns, I have filters that send them to spam directly. I also have two filters for my bank that sometimes send important stuff and other times they send a 10% discount in shavers in another city[emoji][emoji]!!
As much as I am thankful for the innovations Google has given us, we no longer prosecute monopolies where they are toxic unfortunately. The Federal government learned awhile back that it's much easier to manipulate one large company rather than a healthy ecosystem of small companies.
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.
which system does that? neither telegram, nor whatsapp do it, and it annoys the hell out of me. at least whatsapp tells me that the sender doesn't get a notification until i respond or add the contact. wechat actually requires a connection request before allowing you to message someone, with all the complaints about privacy, wechat has the better UX to avoid getting spammed, linkedin requires a connection too, if you don't have a pro account. i don't know about any others.
The problem is how to start a conversation.
We had a similar problem in the university. At the beginning of the semester, the students have to register for a Moodle server with additional material. So when they create an account, we have to send a few thousands of confirmation emails in a short period out of the blue, that makes Gmail/Yahoo/Outlook/Whatever unhappy.
The solution was to ask the students to send an email to the server half an hour before registering. It's not ideal, but it adds us to a secret list of known contacts of the student, so (most) emails are delivered.
> we have to send a few thousands of confirmation emails
What are you confirming, and why do you have to send it as E-mail? If it's sign-ups, just "confirm" using the same system that the user used to sign-up. Presumably HTTP.
on most services you sign up by using an email address (or a phone number) as an identifier. these need to be verified to make sure it's actually yours and not someone else's, or a typo.
They don't need to be verified through E-mail or through the phone, though. A simple landing page after you sign up that says: "We signed up [E-mail] for this service using [phone number]. If this is incorrect, [click here] to make corrections" would work, too.
Frankly, I'm getting tired of having to constantly "verify" this and "confirm" that every time I sign up for or log into an online service. It's especially annoying after I've already signed up. Every bank that I haven't logged into for the last 5 milliseconds hits me with a "confirm your E-mail yet again" flow. I'm going to just start using "password" for my password if these guys keep insisting on round-tripping through my E-mail every time I need to do anything.
Why are you making the students use their personal e-mail rather than the school e-mail?
it's probably the other way around. students use their private email, and they somehow can't make them use a school email.
Then make the system use the school e-mail automatically without asking them? That’s how it works at my faculty.
Well you can already do this with email, can't you? You just use [company-name]@[yourdomain].com. Or you+[company]@gmail.com. Then you either block all unknown, or more practically just block companies as soon as they start spamming you.
Reading this article, all I saw was: Spam Spam Spam Spam:
> we use SendGrid to deliver our emails
Oh oh... here we go, the music is starting...
> hit send on our announcement emails for our new Build Awesome Kickstarter campaign
Spam.
> Now, there are definitely folks who will choose to mark some of what we send as spam.
Yup, spam.
> some of you may have missed things we were genuinely excited to share
Spam.
> our instinct is to only email folks when we actually have something fun to share
Spam.
> A big release, something we’re excited about, news worth your time.
Spam.
> That’d probably be every couple of months
Spam.
> Like, genuinely, if we could, we would only very occasionally send a big email blast to our customers.
Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam... Just like the song. Thank you, Google for doing a great job!
From a user’s PoV. Gmail is awesome. Super low noise and zero phishing emails.
From your PoV maybe. I would be restless knowing that I may be silently losing important emails because they triggered some blackbox filter in such a way that they didn't even end up in my spam box...
If I did not explicitly opt-in to receiving emails, which I never do, I mark them as spam in Gmail. Stop sending unsolicited emails and you won’t be reported for spam, it’s pretty easy.
google marks my private emails that i send as replies to messages from gmail as spam.
i don't send any unsolicited emails from my domain ever. i have nothing to sell. so no, it's not that easy.
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.
How many people here check their spam?
Oh man another spammer complaining about spam filters. You are the reason email sucks, the rest of us can complain about you
What's your spam report rate on Google Postmaster Tools?
Their reputation is probably so poor that GPT won't even show them.
There is no such thing as a third party oracle of reputation. If Gmail users say your behavior is spammy, then it is spam by definition.
something is wrong with gmail filtering, I had no problems for years but now my custom domain emails go to spam when sending to people I've been emailing all the time...
From March, also https://blog.fontawesome.com/we-have-a-99-email-reputation-g... is the canonical URL.
that's the url i submitted, but HN changed it. no idea why.
it hasn't been posted before, and i thought it was interesting.
based on the comments i hope the authors read them, because it looks like they are getting some good feedback here.
``` <!-- SEO/Feeds --> <link rel="canonical" href="https://blogfontawesome.wpcomstaging.com/we-have-a-99-email-..."> ```
Misconfigured website.
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.
an old quote .... ".. having mastered the game of five card stud in the Pacific theater, the victorious Allies declare the game of Poker to be illegal"
People should really stop using GMail. Both for privacy reasons (Google is notorious on mining your email for targeted ads and for sharing data with the US government), and for anti-oligarchy/anti-trust reasons - that company controls much too muh of the activity on the Internet.
There are perfectly fine email providers - free + donations, for-small-fee, at-the-ISP, etc.
>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.