alt Hacker NewsWe have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees
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I use FontAwesome. I bought FontAwesome subscriptions for my team. Love the product.
“We released new icons” (or a new version) is a message that has exactly zero information content for me. My workflow is “I need an icon for this,” so I open FA’s site and search. Done. Remembering that I searched for an icon that wasn’t there months ago, so that I’ll go check and see if it’s in the new release? Not going to happen.
No shade here. If you live, breathe, and devote your life to your product you’re going to be orders of magnitude more excited and attuned than the rest of us. Just… remember that we do not care to the level that you do. We buy it to be a tool in our toolkit, not the center of our lives.
If Ryobi sent me an email whenever they added a new battery-powered tool to their catalog, or upgraded a drill, I’d lose my shit. My time and attention are valuable to me. Don’t take them for granted.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.)
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
#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?
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.
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.
I signed up for one of their early Kickstarter campaigns and they have abused the "project news" system to send me updates for every subsequent project. It's unsolicited marketing. Spam.
If this is their global approach to communication, perhaps Google is right.
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'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.
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.
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.
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 title is misleading, as there's no such thing as a global email reputation. Each SMTP server admin decides what to accept or reject, there's no mandatory, world wide rules for such.
The closest we have to a global ranking are the scores decided by the almost-duopoly of Gmail and Outlook.com, and for the ~75% of it controlled by Gmail, the OP is definitely not at a 99% reputation.
Does anyone want these emails? Users getting them might just be marking them as spam because they're unwanted
This mainly depends on what is the general lifecycle of those emails and how does it interacted with users. If you are sure that you never spamed any users before , then we should think about how the google spam labeling works. For example if you send a bulk email for a mailbox of many emails and those emails were labeled as spam then it may cause this situation maybe. Is there a way to get life cycle of your email box from google maybe ?
>Right before we hit send on our announcement emails for our new Build Awesome Kickstarter campaign... This is spam.
You are spam. It doesn't get any simpler than this.
> it runs its own reputation system that has absolutely nothing to do with anyone else’s opinion of you. If you don’t do certain things “correctly” (meaning Gmail’s own definition), you get marked as spam.
Good?
A lot of people blaming the poster, but I can say I've seen the same thing on completely opt-in lists that aren't doing anything shady. Reality is if you're only sending one email to your list a year, even when people want to receive it, it becomes really hard to send it to gmail. Especially if you're not using a shared IP with other senders. Gmail basically forces you to send messages on a quarterly (or better) cadence, even if you have nothing to say because otherwise it forgets who you are. I am convinced Google has a vested interest in making it hard to send newsletters and product announcements so companies will use their advertising products instead.
I got to know about this when i was setting up my email server, I have never sent emails to people i don't personally know and yet a few did land in spam and i had to ask them to mark it as not spam, that did help with improving the reputation, i also signed up on google postmaster also outlook as well i think. It's a actually a pretty easy thing to setup your own email server, i wrote about it, not the explicit details but the jist of it. https://tech.yaker.in/posts/self-hosted-e-mail-stack
I set up my own mail server for my own use at home. I did everything correctly: DNS, reverse DNS, DMARC, DKIM, SPF, etc. I have the best possible reputation score everywhere. I am the sole owner and user of the IP. But Gmail's magic sauce blocks me because apparently I'm not allowed to send a few emails a week to my own Gmail address from a residential IP... This situation caused by a duopoly that forces us to use either Gmail or 365 is truly a problem that only a regulator can fix.
Even with a dedicated IP, SendGrid has always had poor deliverability.
I switched to Postmark years ago and never looked back.
> We have a 99% email reputation (when you exclude 90% of our deliveries)
> 60% of the time, it works every time.
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!
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
So basically Gmail was right and the system is working as intended?
> To keep a sending IP “warm” and maintain deliverability, you’re expected to send constantly. Like… all the time.
The article provides zero evidence for this claim except "our low-volume (by their own measure) marketing campaign gets marked as spam by gmail".
Even this article is an ad. I have a hard time believing these people don't understand why their advertising gets marked as advertising.
I have seen many cases of Google doing something wrong, but maybe people dont enjoy those emails and they are reporting them as spam?
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.
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.
The number of emails I expect from icons is zero.
Sounds more like Sendgrid didn’t get the memo and their email reputation metric is a poor proxy.
If you’re going to send only occasionally, it’s probably best to use platform shared IP addresses. You’re somewhat at risk in that other people’s bad hygiene could affect you, but you’re mitigating the “cold IP” risk.
Honestly though, these types of blog posts are frustrating to read if one actually has knowledge about email deliverability. It’s so vague. I always wonder if it’s vague on purpose, i.e. they want to complain but they don’t want to admit dumb / bad stuff they did. In my experience Gmail is demanding but it’s not totally random or capricious.
As a former Sendgrid Customer, the big thing that no one has commented on is that Sendgrid's internal "Reputation Score" is complete BS. We had a 98% score, and all the meanwhile our Gmail and Microsoft reputations had been tanking. It took us over a year to switch providers and rebuild a proper reputation with new IPs, and better sending patterns, unsubscribe policies, etc.
Monitor Gmail's & Microsofts actual Postmaster tools, use a tool like MXToolbox for blacklist monitoring. Sendgrid's internal scoring is completely broken, and they don't care.
Sendgrid/Twilio has given up.
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?
From a user’s PoV. Gmail is awesome. Super low noise and zero phishing emails.
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.
hello,
as always: imho (!)
but google/gmail is pretty open about why they deny your emails - idk ... mail authentication =?> dkim/spf/... or similar technical details etc.
interestingly i have more "problems" with the other "big" (free)mail providers like yahoo or gmx, which are often not so "open" about why they reject your mail ... even google is pretty happy with my setup :))
just my 0.02€
I encountered this as well. If you only send a few email verification emails, the bounce rate is high. The only way to fix is to email the verified accounts regularly to push the stat on that side of the equation.
If you want to send me unsolicited marketing email and not go to spam, be funny. Otherwise I will mark it as spam.
Why not replace the SMTP with an API and explicit permissions. When registering for a newsletter, I would explicitly grant the sender right to push stuff to my inbox. At any point I could revoke this right and the sender would get clear error message when pushing.
Old fashioned person-to-person email would work as it does. This would only apply to the app-to-user stuff, which in my case makes up >99% of my emails.
I need to side with GMail: Over the last year or so, email has turned into a cesspool. No one even reads it anymore.
Every week someone who I've never heard of adds me to some pointless email list that I never wanted and will never read. My inbox is constantly clogged with notifications that I never asked for, and don't care about. Every time I open an app or buy something from a website they think they can send me pointless emails forever.
The bigger problem is a lack of regulation: Because there's no rules, everyone needs to fight to keep their email at the top of the queue of unopened emails.
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