alt Hacker NewsWe have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees
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> We even have a 99% reputation score in SendGrid. Gold star. A+ student.
Why that would matter ? That's about as valuabe as Trump's peace prize
use actual google tools to see actual reputation https://postmaster.google.com/v2/sender_compliance
You can also add some headers to get per-campaign spam reputation and any issues
No. It's not email that sucks, it is Gmail and also the people that use Gmail. Same for Microsoft. If you want to play the marketing email game, start to build relationships with employees from google and microsoft.
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.
What's your spam report rate on Google Postmaster Tools?
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.
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.
> 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.
so....you are spammers.
"respectful" is zero emails, unless I requested one or purchased something and need a receipt. Anything more than that is spam, will be reported. I hope that eventually everyone who thinks that their "exciting announcements" are of interest to unsuspecting people get banned from the internet back into the stone age...
They are not being upfront about whether they are sending transactional or marketing email, which have significantly different compliance requirements for jurisdictions like Europe and also for email providers themselves.
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.
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.
Oh man another spammer complaining about spam filters. You are the reason email sucks, the rest of us can complain about you
>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.
gmail... toxic for internet now. But gmail toxicity is only the tip of the iceberg.
I remember when I had a gmail account, when they did shutdown the classic web view (noscript/basic (x)html) to force people to use one of the "whatng" web engines. No netsurf/links2/lynx anymore... wow, what a bunch of animals.
Then I moved to being self hosted (soon on RISC-V hardware of course, at the time, I could get my hands only on arm hardware, sad), then I lost my domain name. Of course the geniuses over there did the same thing than the animals at gogol: they broke classic web support (noscript/basic (x)html). Now, to pay for and book a domain name, you must have one of the "whatng" cartel web engines. Wow, geniuses indeed. Not even able to understand why there is an issue at depending on one of the massive and ultra-complex "whatng" cartel web engines.
To add insult to injury: spamhaus. Basically, if you do not "pay them", you are in their blocklist which many ultra-skilled sysadmins use without thinking twice, trusting those lists blindly. Of course, spamhaus is a nice "company" based in andore and switzerland... who said shabby as f?
Then, the email standard designers were careful to have "no DNS" support with IPv[46] literals (which is stronger than SPF, since emails, their envelop and header, referencing a SMTP server with a different IPv[46] can be dropped without further processing). gmail is forbidding its users to send to such email addresses, and when you try to send to gmail such emails from such SMTP server, they block them due to the IPv[46] literal. The bottom of the barrel of humanity.
They are turning internet into a new compuserve/aol. This is pure evil.
> it [gmail] 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.
I mean that's correct; I choose email providers in part due to their spam protection. I don't want to follow what a company believes is the right amount of emails, I want to decide and if they fail they should be blocked. I wouldn't be surprised if that 99% sendgrid rating is either due to some dark pattern or because everything is already being sent to spam except for those who specifically allow it.
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.
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TLDR: Spammer wonders why their spam sent through a spam service (SendGrid) isn't getting delivered.
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Like it seems one needs to re-think email from first principles here. One idea is to use a the idea of "theory of mind"(ToM). e.g. The ToM between me and a sender would be for both to know: "I am not as excited as you about your product launch, so sending it is a 'spam' from my PoV".
We could use two negotiating agent, e.g. my agent that knows what I care about now/today/1-week ago and negotiates with an aspirant sender's agent before they send me any messages. e.g. I could set a policy based (my ToM) for my agent like "Between 1-1:15PM every day I want to read about all product announcements I subscribed to for XYZ product type". My agent would go talk to the aspirant's sender agent and gets messages right then.
An alternative policy could be "I have some free time now, create a summary/gist of all announcements on products I might be interested in.". The agents would negotiate with the sender to do the same.
Signups emails would be to replaced by an agent which "creates" a ToM with sender on hard-stop dates. I would tell my agent : "I am interested in this logging service to compare different ones, I will not be interested once ENG-123 is closed" and mine would not just tell the sender that they are not interested when the time comes (which is when ENG-123 is closed).
Longer term policies would just age out any message negotiations because I don't like/care about those products anymore.
> Turns out, the email gods hate that. To keep a sending IP “warm” and maintain deliverability, you’re expected to send constantly. Like… all the time.
That's funny, it reminds me of the US credit history system that I discovered for the few years I lived in that strange country.
For me, having no debt is the gold standard of being a trustable person to lend money to. You'll be the only company I'll owe money, surely I won't have any issue paying you! But no: in the US system you need to constantly borrow money to prove that you're good at paying it back...
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.