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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'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...

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

>Right before we hit send on our announcement emails for our new Build Awesome Kickstarter campaign... This is spam.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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?

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.

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'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.

Sounds more like Sendgrid didn’t get the memo and their email reputation metric is a poor proxy.

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.

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.

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

If you want to send me unsolicited marketing email and not go to spam, be funny. Otherwise I will mark it as spam.

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.

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.

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!

> Now, there are definitely folks who will choose to mark some of what we send as spam. And for them, rightly so. We get that. But this is not that.

Your reputation depends on THAT. Other metrics you think matter, they do not.

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

How many people here check their spam?

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.

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

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

TLDR: Spammer wonders why their spam sent through a spam service (SendGrid) isn't getting delivered.