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.
My phone network provider ran some "12 days of Christmas" promotion last year which entailed a spam email trying to hawk me crap I don't need every single day. When I tried to opt-out they told me it would take a month. I emailed the ICO and the network provider's complaints team and miraculously they were able to remove me from the mailing list immediately.
Inside the marketing org bubble, quantity is the "any moron could see that" metric. So anyone who wants to get ahead, inside that bubble, had better be willing to optimize it.
> 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.
Hmm, wouldn't you want to remove the money losing people as soon as possible, so you don't waste even more money on them?
He probably meant that “customer” is not making him money, therefore not worth the time. The only reason unsubscribing works at all is probably a legal requirement.
It does, probabilistically. For any given customer C, the expected value EV(C) is... not much. By starting an opt-out process, a customer Co is revealed to have EV(Co) = 0, which is less than not much.
That's not really relevant here. The complaint is that you start getting promotional emails right away, meaning that adding you to a mailing list is instant, but removing you somehow takes ten days. Normally you can't unsubscribe from transactional email, as they serve to provide you with information you're legally entitled to. There might be companies that are foolish enough to use the same system for both transactional and marketing email, but normally you'd never do that, because you exactly risk having things like order confirmation, recalls, invoices and so on, be tagged as spam, if it uses the same system as the marketing emails. Frequently you can use the same provider, allowing for tracking bounce rates, open indication and so on, but even if it's within the same interface or set of APIs, the two things are kept very separate on the backend. They'd at least use different email addresses, but frequently also different domains/sub-domains.
I've done both transactional and marketing emails, and I've never seen a system that could not remove a user at least within 24 hours. I can imagine one, but you're doing something very wrong at that point. Ten days is deliberate.
> 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.
Fuck me, that is brutal and could absolutely ruin your SES complaint rate - even with the suppression filter on, as the emails are already in your inbox.
When I worked on a notification system that sent over a billion messages a month. We received spam complaints on emails sent 6+ years ago. No correlation, just a one-off spam complaint. I always wondered why this was happening.
Probably because people like me finally had some time to go through an inbox with 20,000 unread messages. Almost anything that's been unread was either (most likely spam) or (very rarely) just simply unimportant.
I have done the opposite
We had a million people enter their email over the last decade
We haven’t messaged a single one.
Now we plan to start sending out a newsletter. For many, they may have forgotten downloading the app, but they might still appreciate it. If not - they can u subscribe.
Instead, send them a politely worded one-time announcement with an invitation to subscribe. Clearly mention that if they don't, this is the last mail they'll get from you, and keep that promise by deleting their address. You'll still get some pushback, but I think most people would find that acceptable.
That one-time announcement is called an email. And therefore that first announcement itself can be flagged as spam.
And naturally, unless they click a link in the first email, gmail should consider anything subsequent to be spam anyway. They have no idea whether consent happened somewhere else or not.
The unsubscribe links must work without even opening the email, according to gmail rules.
What I'd be concerned with is that if you have never sent anything to these users, they might have forgotten where and when they gave you their email address and simply mark your message as spam.
We've trained users to not use "unsubscribe" because some spammers once used that to verify addresses, or they may simply click "Spam" because they forgot who you are and think you got their address illegitimately. Gmail also doesn't make unsubscribe as visible as "Spam", making flagging the easier option. So now Gmail will see some percentage of users manually flagging you as a spammer, tainting your sender. This is why I'd switch the newsletter to a new domain or at least a new sender address. That does mean preparing that new sender, give it a bit of time to mature and send a few emails to Gmail accounts you control and ensure that they are not flagged as spam.
Probably also test with a list of Gmail account you control and check if you're tagged as spam and fix that, before doing the big push.
As a gmail user who may or may not have had to enter an email address to do something on the web, and who gets annoyed by spam, let me describe my decision points (anecdote is not the plural of data, of course, but here I am) when it comes to "unsubscribe" vs marking something "spam."
If your email reminds me (upfront!) how and when and why I specifically gave you (and not some other third party) my email address, and promises that you are advertising this newsletter one time, and it is opt-in, and you keep your promise, I am highly unlikely to mark it spam.
Now, this presupposes that it was really me who gave you my email address. I have a fairly generic email address because I got on gmail early. There are many variants of it, but sometimes people forget to add the trailing numbers or letters, so I get misdirected email all the time.
If the misdirected email is personal, I usually respond letting them know of the issue.
If the misdirected email shows a clear understanding that I might not have been the one who really signed up then I give them a pass.
If the misdirected email blithely assumes that I am the one who signed up, then I blithely assume that its senders are too fucking stupid to use the internet and it goes straight into the spam bucket. (And this is usually an easy call because they use the name of the person with the similar email address, which is not my name. My email address is firstinitiallastname@gmail.com and there are many different first names that start with the same initial.)
Any failure on any of those other points starts to increase the likelihood of it being marked spam, and...
> The unsubscribe links must work without even opening the email, according to gmail rules.
So here's where I'm a hard-ass and maybe even worse than google's rules.
If I see the RFC8058 unsubscribe link, it is too late. I only notice that link after I've decided to mark your email as "spam" and google asks if I'm sure, or if I merely want to unsubscribe.
Why did I decide to mark your email as spam? One possible reason is that I read through it, decided that the sender legitimately had my email address and was acting honorably, and then clicked the unsubscribe link embedded in the email.
When I do that, one of two things happens. Either I get some form of "thank you, you've been unsubscribed" or nothing happens because the sender assumes that I am OK with them executing javascript on my computer.
This is a privilege I jealously guard and only reluctantly offer to as few websites as possible.
Even if I previously gave you my email address, that did not come with an open invitation to use my computing resources for your own purposes.
So by your own description, ANYONE sending you a newsletter, by complying with Google’s rules, they piss you off and make you mark their email as SPAM because, according to you, they made “javascript execute on your computer”. Actually, gmail is the one executing tons of javascript. The mandatory unsubscribe LINK uses HTTP, not even HTML. Google just requires that the unsubscribe instant.
It is an unwinnable situation.
With all respect, why would I care what an impossibly hardass tech person would do if I sent them an email in an unwinnable situation? The vast majority of our users are not this technical, let alone a hardass HN denizen who advertises the fact that the mere compliance with Google’s rules will piss them off due to a misunderstanding of how unsubcribe works.
Here is what we might both agree on: email sucks. You shouldn’t be reachable by anyone who just has your address, and it is not your job to be vigilant. Then all these problems go away.
> So by your own description, ANYONE sending you a newsletter, by complying with Google’s rules, they piss you off and make you mark their email as SPAM because, according to you, they made “javascript execute on your computer”.
Are you deliberately being obtuse, or is it natural? I don't need to use gmail's web interface if I don't want to, but as it happens, I do let google's javascript execute on my computer.
> The mandatory unsubscribe LINK uses HTTP, not even HTML.
Two links are required. One in the header, and one in the email. As I wrote, if I read to the end of the email to make a decision, then I will click on the link in the email. Which often goes to a webpage with javascript on it.
> It is an unwinnable situation.
Did I write that I mark everything as spam? No? Why not, I wonder? Did it ever occur to you that if I am describing when I mark things as spam, that there are things that I don't mark as spam? No? Do you even read what you yourself write? No? You should try it sometime.
> With all respect, why would I care what an impossibly hardass tech person would do if I sent them an email in an unwinnable situation?
With all respect, if you wrongly believe the rules I gave are unwinnable, you shouldn't care. I won't be receiving further missives from you, and nature will take its course in determining whether I was an outlier or the canary in the coalmine.
>So here's where I'm a hard-ass and maybe even worse than google's rules. If I see the RFC8058 unsubscribe link, it is too late. I only notice that link after I've decided to mark your email as "spam" and google asks if I'm sure, or if I merely want to unsubscribe.
The way I read it, this is an unwinnable situation. We must supply this link, in order to comply with Google's rules. If you see this link, it's too late. You're making it as spam. Because I may run javascript on your computer.
Having re-read it, it sounds instead like: you're likely mark it as spam before you get to this link (even though the web interface surfaces the unsubscribe button right in the list of emails -- but you don't use that interface).
Well, I guess there is a narrow path to "victory": mention that it may have been someone else who signed up, then if you see the unsubscribe link, you click it, then I'm supposed to say "thank you" and not serve any javascript. Anything else, and you click SPAM. Or maybe you already did.
> The way I read it, this is an unwinnable situation. We must supply this link, in order to comply with Google's rules. If you see this link, it's too late.
That's an obtuse reading.
I am looking at the email. The email has a different link, mandated by the can-spam act in it.
Gmail has a bunch of icons at the top. There is not one for "unsubscribe".
So, I read your email, decide it is legitimate but I am not interested. I click on the link (not RFC8058) in the body of the email message itself to unsubscribe.
If that link takes me to a page that does nothing because it wants to execute javascript on my computer, then we are done.
Look, I'm not a terrible writer and this isn't that difficult.
> Well, I guess there is a narrow path to "victory": mention that it may have been someone else who signed up, then if you see the unsubscribe link, you click it, then I'm supposed to say "thank you" and not serve any javascript.
Oh, well, you did understand. Sort of. Except I view this as a common-sensical extremely wide path. If it's the first time that you're emailing me, you damn well better realize that it might have been a fake signup, and how the fuck am I supposed to know your intentions if you attempt to serve javascript? What part of removing me from your database requires you to execute shit on my computer?
And by the way, about this part of that statement:
> if you see the unsubscribe link
If you're playing "hide the link" then you've already shown that your intentions aren't honorable.
> Anything else, and you click SPAM.
I don't actually click spam all that often. Only on, you know, spam.
Look, you're the one who mentioned that you might have collected some of these email addresses 10 years ago. I'm just giving you a heads-up. Not only may they have forgotten about signing up, but the addresses themselves might have been recycled by now.
> Or maybe you already did.
Nope. I've been upfront and transparent. I thought you were being that way, too, given your first comment. I even upvoted it because I thought all the downvoting was a bit excessive.
But the intransigence and mischaracterization here is stunning.
Look, there are two possibilities here. (1) is that I'm not that extreme, in which case you're probably fucked. (2) is that, yes, I'm an outlier, and if you satisfy my needs, then you probably won't have enough emails marked spam to trigger google's filters.
Now, if you truly feel that my conditions offer only a narrow path to victory, then you're probably not really someone I should be offering this advice to in any case, because our interests are not congruent. My only solace is that maybe you won't take the advice and you'll receive a banning for your efforts.
> Instead, send them a politely worded one-time announcement with an invitation to subscribe.
NO. DO NOT DO THAT !
That is terrible advice and it is against the law.
Opt-in has to be done without inducement and of a person's own volition.
Sending a mail to someone saying "pretty please sign up" is not valid opt-in. It is spamming a bunch of people hoping they will opt-in. It does not matter if you got their mail another way (e.g. if they purchased a product, you can't then spam them trying to get them to opt-in for your mailing list).
One of the fundamental reasons the opt-in law exists is to stop people doing the shit you suggest and ensure that lists are correctly built in a clean manner.
Under GDPR, can someone send an email to people who 1) downloaded our app, 2) voluntarily entered their email, viewing a message that says if they do that, we can send them a newsletter about how to be more efficient with the app, and 3) selected what kind of person they are, e.g. a teacher, marketer, etc.
But it's been 10 years. Can we send them a newsletter now with an unsubscribe link? Does GDPR have an expiration date on that stuff? Yes it was affirmatively opt-in.
Be aware that under various regulations, you're potentially already at risk of accusation in terms of unwarranted data retention. If you haven't got a good reason to have kept those email addresses, something like the GDPR might not interpret that favourably. While the GDPR doesn't specify actual time limits, they are expected to be proportionate. Financial records are generally 7 years unless otherwise legally required, so for a decade, you would be saying that these email addresses are more critical/valid than that. That may be the case, I don't know your business, but be careful if you don't want some very awkward questions asked. Just the hassle of having to deal with complaints you might get (and various regulators would take notice of 1 million instances) is likely to be more than it's worth for most.
The suggestion downthread to send a very clear "we still have your address, would you like to opt in to this newsletter, otherwise we'll remove it" is not a bad one, but even then, some people will object to you still having it at all.
People originally opted in and provided it expecting to get a newsletter on how to use the app. We never seemed to have the bandwidth to create a good enough one, so we never sent it. We kept improving the app until it became very good and still never sent the emails. But retained the addresses, so that one day we could tell people the app has improved, to give it a try, include animated GIFs of it in action and gradually educate them on ways to use it. For that I get chastizement on HN, figures.
Yes, there is a clearly valid business purpose under GDPR for retaining the email addresses of users who want to learn how to use your app better and opted in. If you plan to send a newsletter out.
Other than those voluntarily entered emails (which aren’t even linked to the user), we haven’t retained literally any information about our users, despite having millions of users download and use the app over a decade. Which is far beyond pretty much any social app I know. But almost no one actually cares.
I really wasn't trying to chastize, honestly it was intended as a friendly dollop of advice as someone who's dealt with this kind of thing. But since you have replied, I would say:
> Yes, there is a clearly valid business purpose under GDPR for retaining the email addresses of users who want to learn how to use your app better and opted in.
Relevance is likely to be seen as contextual. Someone wishing to do something a full decade ago is not likely to be seen as sufficient evidence to justify contacting them now in case they still wish to. That's a big chunk of the point about time-limiting data retention - the data gets less relevant and more problematic over time. I get that you're not trying to colour outside the lines here, but from the perspective of your users, and anyone looking at their potential complaints from a regulatory perspective, the window in which they reasonably consented to contact has closed (and probably some time ago).
The regulations are there, ostensibly, to protect consumers. They will be interpreted in that light. I can almost guarantee that if you sent an email to your downloader base 10 years after they last heard from you, being ignored will be the best case, and the worst will be reports to local regulators.
Is there an actual regulation or case law showing what the cutoff time is du jure?
I would be glad to respect it if there was.
As it is, laws do allow for things they didn’t explicitly prohibit, and especially good-faith things like welcoming people to try the free app again, which they themselves downloaded and asked to be exucated about, since it’s improved, and showing them how and why to use the improvements.
Yeah, that's fair enough, and it is annoying that there is rarely a specific time set in regulation (or even case law which is broadly applicable). Most regulatory bodies will tend to say things like "as short as required/possible" for retention, which is clearly open to interpretation [0].
I would personally see 10 years as "a long time" in this kind of context (although that may be contextual depending on what your product does, obviously). If you can honestly claim/show good faith, that is usually acknowledged, but my point was rather how it would be seen out of the blue from an organisation that has been silent for 10 years (my personal first thought would be "why the hell have they still got my information?", but I am well aware that I'm not the average).
Genuinely, I don't mean to imply bad faith on your part, only to suggest the reactions it may receive, and how careful you should be with your messaging.
>Is there an actual regulation or case law showing what the cutoff time is du jure? I would be glad to respect it if there was.
I'm sorry but what sort of BS excuse is that ?
The whole point is that YOU are supposed to know:
a) What data you have
b) What you need it for
It is simply not possible for data protection law to spell out an exact cut-off time because there are so many permutations.
For example, if its for tax reasons then you need to keep it for the duration dictated by tax laws.
But if its email addresses you randomly harvested a decade ago, I think every man and his dog would agree that a decade is too long. Even more so if there is a material difference in permitted use of the harvested address.
P.S. There is no such thing as "good-faith things" in GDPR legislation. Please don't make shit up.
- non-legally speaking, consent for anything is never illimited in time. So whatever the law says, you're probably doing a dick move, I'm sure you can conceive that most people you're going to email would rather not get this email and you're planning to do it anyway. So if you act against these people's interest, don't be surprised if they react negatively (reporting the email as spam, complaining, reporting you to authorities)
- legally speaking... IANAL, but I don't think that you're correct that you have a legal basis to have kept this data, and even less to use it for marketing purposes. I don't think that you'd win the argument that the consent is still "informed" after many years of not hearing from you. If a reasonable person would no longer expect to hear from this company, then I don't think you still have consent under GDPR (could be wrong, IANAL)
So basically — you are affirming the point of the OP whose article was shared.
Wait too long — respect people’s attention and time so much that you don’t send them anything unless it is ready and benefits them - and apparently it’s spam when you finally do contact them. Meanwhile, if you were just drip feeding them slop once a month, then you’re fine.
I happen to agree with the article author, the email ecosystem is totally broken, that’s far more of a problem than small teams who have well-meaning intentions and respect for their users’ time. You’re blaming the victim, rather than the email system that’s open to SPAM and dominated by gmail.
Most consent doesn't work like this in people's minds (never mind what you "recorded"). I'd be furious and immediately flag as spam and review the app 1 star (if possible) for good measure.
Sure. I took it as I think you intended - a statement of your understanding. I guess I just was irritated in, the moment as people are constantly reacting to unverified assumptions when there are many real things to react to. Apologies if I added to the pile of annoying things on the internet for you!
>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. I'll see a whole page of categories and somehow the last one will be enabled even though I'm sure I'd have turned them all off when I disabled the bulk of them.
Another worse offender is gitlab. They send promotions hidden as a part of this is obligatory account related into telling blah blah and adding BTW see these extra features for more payments.
Not just gitlab. I'm seeing this happen more and more. I'm assuming it relies on the fact that it's a nontrivial investment to file a government complaint.
Or add junk to existing categories. Amazon are sending me a ton of notifications for their “Haul” shop but I have absolutely zero interest in the cheapest made shit. No way to turn off those notifications without disabling the entire category.
I recently tried disabling notification in LinkedIn. The designers and engineers working there who created the notifications settings are truly evil. You have to go through 14 categories. Some of them let you toggle the whole category at once, some don't. Some categories are split into 8 more subcategories.
To this day I do not have a LinkedIn account because they have historically been the most aggressive spammers of any company. The year I graduated college, almost 2/3 of the e-mails I received were LinkedIn 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.
Stripe does this to me and it's starting to get annoying. They offer an unsubscribe option to remove you from current mailing lists but perpetually have you auto added to new mailing lists effectively making the unsubscribe option useless.
We got political spam from one of our credit card issuers. It ended with this BS:
> ABOUT THIS EMAIL: This email was sent by [lender] to provide important account servicing information regarding your [lender] account. You may receive account servicing emails even if you have requested not to receive marketing offers by email for your [lender] account.
That outright lie had me ready to toss a brick through their front door. I haven’t been that righteously furious in ages.
Intel did this to me with a job application... they just sent tons of promo shit even after I unsubscribed
And people wonder why I make unique email addresses for every site and even multiple for some sites. It's for exactly this (and to see who's selling it). My only real recourse is to delete the email address. Thanks mozmail, and thanks bitwarden for integrating. But it's also dumb as shit that we have to do things like this.
It's not a solution, it is a defense. A solution would not require the action in the first place. It is a shitty thing that we have to act this way and we shouldn't be complacent with our defenses. The solution is to make a world where we don't need to constantly defend.
I do the same. Gmail gives me a single, standardized interface for opting out of emails: mark it as spam. All the various companies I've given my email to, on the other hand, give me different, either clunky or often outright broken interfaces for opting out. There's no direct financial incentive for them to invest in making ethical, robust opt-out systems.
However well meaning, collectively all those companies are still just a bunch of sociopaths. This might be a bit dark, but I think a reasonable real world analogy here is stalkers and restraining orders. A stalker isn't motivated to listen to you when you tell them to stop talking to you. That's why you get the restraining order.
I've noticed the same. Companies are disguising what are obviously marketing, advertising, or promotional content as "transactional." Experian is probably the most famous of these offenders. They send "transactional" emails every month that can't be opted out of when they notice changes in my credit file (everyone's credit file changes every month almost by definition!) It's scummy, intentional, and IMO breaking the law.
> They send "transactional" emails every month that can't be opted out of when they notice changes in my credit file
And you can't even try to unsubscribe without creating an account. And, if I don't _have_ an account, it is (pretty much by definition) NOT transactional.
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 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.
But that same exact logic applies to "it's really hard to succeed, so I'm going to just mug some people to get the money I need". I'm sorry, but "its hard to succeed, so I'm justified in being unethical" is _not_ a valid excuse.
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.
Get this through your head: I. do. not. want. to. be. in. a. relationship. with. you. Using your product or service one time is not consent. Finding partners is hard, but that is no reason to propose marriage on the first date, and that strategy will not work well. No means no.
>Do you know how exceedingly hard it is to grow a business
how is this my problem? Do you think wanting to be one of the cool entrepreneurs is a right or something? I don't care if the in your words shameless hustle goes under because you're spamming my mail with your fifteenth startup idea, that's my attention you're wasting, go get a real job.
I'll take trustworthy big business over shameless small business, I hope Google filters more of the stuff. I'm always astonished by people who try to justify their sketchy business practices with their underdog status. Those are by the way the exact same people who, once they succeed, do what they accuse Google of
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.
That's normal business thing. What significantly helps reducing this, though, is the business is not promising the stars and engaging in all kinds of dark patterns with deals, cancellation friction, etc.
> Get angry at an email.
Particularly e-mail they did not ask for, and is not directly related to the thing they're paying $10/mo for.
> Every fashion brand on the planet reengages their customers this way and it works.
I often receive emails from (among other things) fashion brands to which I never subscribed. There are clearly multiple people worldwide who, mistakenly or intentionally, are giving my `firstname.lastname@gmail.com` at checkout or whatever rather than their own.
Every time I receive one of those emails I do two things:
1. Use their unsubscribe link on a private window, connecting with a VPN exit point in their country (or nearby). If asked, I select the "I never subscribed" or "This is spam" option.
2. Mark the email as spam on GMail, rejecting GMail's proposal to unsubscribe instead (as I already did).
I have no mercy and feel no guilt at reducing their email server's reputation. The only exceptions I make are the rare emails that ask me to confirm "my" subscription before sending "me" their stuff. That I respect, and I just ignore and delete.
Reengaging customers is not gaining customers. I haven't been an engineer all my life, but I've been "on the ground" that entire time and I sure have gained a lot of disdain for a lot of companies because they won't stop emailing me.
If a company sends me mail and I don't remember allowing them to, I will not trust them and will not use the unsubscribe button, because using it signals to the sender that my address is valid. I will mark as spam.
The onus for clearly communicating that you are going to mail me anything other than transaction updates is with the sender, not the receiver.
Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"?
That's a bit carried away, don't you think?
There are unsubscribe buttons with laws that enforce that they work.
Meanwhile hyperscalers are constantly in your eyes and ears and they have a million ways to bypass those regulations and get into your headspace regardless.
Your URL bar is an ad. Your phone default settings and push notifications are ads. Your app store is an ad. Every new feature or OS update is an ad. Your new tab screen is an ad. Your browser updates are ads.
Dollars are spent on attention. You don't make it in this world without securing some attention.
Some have worked themselves into a place of eternal captive attention, everyone else is either climbing the mountain or running the treadmill.
And all those employees' livelihoods depend on it working. Otherwise they starve.
Be thankful you, as presumably an engineer, don't have to be exposed to this game. It's Darwinian and adversarial, zero sum, a fight to survive.
Maybe you're happy working for someone who does all this work for you or figured out a tiny niche where it isn't necessary. But reality is much different.
> Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"?
I purchase a product from company X. They require an email and will not let me buy without it. I actually do want an email confirmation that the order went through and even that my product shipped.
I do not want emails about "we released a new thing" or "we have a sale" or "it's Tuesday and we want you to remember we exist". Signing me up without an explicit opt-in using information you required me to provide is absolutely unethical.
"X is even worse" does not make Y ethical, good, or acceptable. What your least favorite corporations do isn't relevant.
Other people are inconsiderate monsters who litter in national parks and abandon mattresses on the side of the road. BP and Exxon did more damage to the environment than I ever could. It's still unethical if I drop my garbage on the ground.
> Dollars are spent on attention. You don't make it in this world without securing some attention.
I love your word choice here. "Securing" almost perfectly defines it, because you are acting with hostility against the person whose attention you are seeking to capture.
Exactly. Like most "growth hackers," they assume that our attention is their resource to consume, and we should all be grateful for the privilege of making them rich.
No thanks. I reject this as the abusive practice and mentality that it is.
> Your URL bar is an ad. Your phone default settings and push notifications are ads. Your app store is an ad. Every new feature or OS update is an ad. Your new tab screen is an ad. Your browser updates are ads.
How do you define ads? Those are not ads in my book. An update is not an ad, I can't think of any valid interpretation of that other than "existence is an ad because people who interact with it might want to do do again" but at that point the word "ad" has lost all useful meaning.
To be fair, I think echelon was calling out that there are absolutely ads in browser updates now. "Try Firefox VPN!" "Look what's new in Chrome!", etc.
> Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"?
In some countries it's not just "unethical", but outright illegal. Laws and rules vary, but all is equal to the spam button and the whims of those wielding it.
> Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"?
The premise is that people are specifically opting OUT of those emails. Feel free to keep "hustling", feel free to treat people as resources to exploit, just don't be shocked and upset when those resources treat you like a parasite to be removed from their lives without concern for your financial wellbeing.
> There are unsubscribe buttons with laws that enforce that they work.
They don't. Period. Full Stop. There are tons of companies that I have told to stop sending me emails that just... continue to do so. And some that won't _allow_ me to tell them to stop (I need to create an account to tell them not to email me... but they shouldn't be emailing me if I don't have an account).
A lot of y'all treat customers like shit - spam them, engage in dark patterns, constantly try to upsell, ask them to fill out surveys before they've completed a single purchase - then act surprised when businesses have to lay off or go under.
> Do you know how exceedingly hard it is to grow a business
This reminds me of a local bricks and mortar small business that closed down and the wife posted a completely tone deaf:
"It is a horrible shame that our long sought out dream had to die because the local "community" was not willing to support it."
I missed the part where "community" meant we are obligated to expend our own resources for your profit.
Doubly galling was the fact that there was generally "his n hers" G Wagons parked out front of their business. Doing better than 95% of the community and still pissed that the community wasn't giving them more.
You're fighting small biz and accept the world big tech has created to extort all of us.
You'd yell at that local brick and mortar for sending you a half off coupon in your email because it's spam, but my guess is you're fine with perpetual smartphone upgrades and not owning the entire vertical taxation and lock-in stack.
We're allowing ourselves to become serfs of big business that would no sooner outsource or lay us off.
The puzzling moral superiority is what really gets me.
Just don't complain when your tech company lays you off or your job has been automated out of existence. You might have to learn what hustle and sales really are.
I have no problem with small business, but it seems like you have a chip on your shoulder and completely failed to miss the point. But, in case it wasn't clear - a husband and wife couple, who already appear to be more successful than the vast majority of the community they're in, actually going so far as to get pissed off at the community for not making them even richer. "The "community" (bonus points for the snarky air quotes) was UNWILLING to support OUR dream" they posted, from the front seat of their $200,000 SUVs.
Now, explain to me why I am somehow obligated to support their business?
You're asking for others to take abuse on your behalf because your needs are more important than theirs. You're abusive. Stop coping and admit the truth. You're part of the problem but wrapping it in victimhood.
> 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.
During a 1 month period (2024-03-26 to 2024-04-25) FontAwesome sent me 18 different marketing emails, including 4 in one day. I am not sure that matches with their supposed 'instinct' and I am unsurprised that they have a bad email reputation.
Off-topic: you're the same famfamfam that used to have a really great set of flag icons years ago? Thank you for that, I used it on a project and it was totally awesome.
I don't mind if a company sends me emails if I gave them my email address. As long as, when I click "unsubscribe" to the email, they stop. I don't want to have to go log back into their system and unsubscribe. I just want to click the unsubscribe button and have it be done - forever, not just until they add a new category for email.
I have a fair number of companies that send me emails (because I signed up for their service) on a "slow" basis (ie, when they have something interesting.. not just "every week, so you don't forget us). I don't mind those. Sometimes I read them, sometimes I don't. I don't unsubscribe and I don't mark them as spam.
I'm not saying you should be the same as me. I _am_ saying that, just because _you_ don't like it, doesn't make them "clearly in the wrong". Because there are people that feel like the way they are acting is reasonable.
FYI, requiring logging in to unsubscribe is a violation of the CAN-SPAM Act in the U.S., I just mark those as spam if they don't allow one-click unsubscribes.
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
That is standard practice because you will need to cycle that marketing domain until the end of time as its email reputation sinks into the abyss. Because people don’t want spam.
It's good practice because sometimes I don't feel like hitting the Spam button but I still want to black-hole the marketing e-mails. If you are also sending transaction e-mails through that address, then I have to decide whether to bother keeping you as a sender.
So many of these "freemium" things will spam you relentlessly asking you to upgrade.
This one doesn't have the best history either, although it's officially open source, at least at one point the build system was private[0]. I've not kept up with the drama, so I have no idea if that is still the case.
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 no longer even unsubscribe when I get an unsolicited email. I intentionally stay subscribed but mark everything as spam. My hope is if people start doing this there will be more and more instances like this post, which is a good thing. Stop emailing me. Stop opting me in. And stop pretending like you're doing it for my benefit.
Yeah but that doesn't matter. The misdirection about needing the email address to download is working as intended, getting unwilling subscribers who then mark you as spam when they see your emails, and you get blackholed.
The solution isn't a legalese CYA "but there's an alternative", it's to only sign up people who want to hear from you.
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.
I unsubscribe, and immediately set up a filter to mark any email from their (sub)domain as spam. Too many sites keep spamming for a week or two after unsubscribing, that behavior deserves a reputation drop.
I'm well aware that some spam also use unsubscribe links as a signal to spam more. I use my gut to decide if I mark as spam and/or block or try the unsubscribe link if it exists.
My gut says unsolicited marketing emails, from popular sites I've never used before, like Brooks Brothers or Robinhood (especially after a "Welcome to ${site}!") or US public school event notification emails are all probably legit mistakes.
I could see even a public school system having issues with getting flagged as spam if they don't include an easy method to unsubscribe because then marking as spam+blocking becomes the best option in response to wrong address.
Yeah, the spin on that used to be "that's because we plan our campaigns in advance and use partners to handle them and we have to submit a final list and..." (insert several different types of horseshit here that might survive a passing glance but little more than that).
> Identify each subscription list by including a human-readable identifier in each message 'List-ID:' header or use a unique 'From:' address to send messages for different subscriptions. This means each mailing list used to send subscription messages should have its own unique 'From:' address.
Constantly receiving email from one alias is fine since it signals a subscription-like communications. Recycling through different aliases for the same recepient is surefire way to get flagged.
If you want to "personalize" the email, just add the name of the marketer in the subject or footer.
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.
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.
People who are such fans that they want to know will find out - I refresh https://toolguyd.com/ multiple times a week because I do want to know what crazy shit Ryobi and others are up to. But I’m rare.
> We buy it to be a tool in our toolkit, not the center of our lives.
Somehow this thought evades almost all software providers nowadays. Distracting, and in equal amount, obstructing self promotions and unwanted hints are the norm, which is making life worse, not better. Then why paying them to annoy us? Somehow this very basic thought is not there, not a bit in most of the cases. They want to be the center of our attention. Idiotic. (I do not ask for forgiveness for this strong word. I believe that the costly - and eventually paid by us - marketing teams are dumb copycats senselessly pushing bad practices established elsewhere through time. I do not dare trying to find exceptions, it is hard.)
> 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.
This is a simple case of "we" and "you" having different points of view. Sure, "we" think we have something fun to share, big news, we haven't emailed in a couple of months so users are probably anxious to hear from us. "You," the user, is getting 20 emails a day from people who think they are sharing something fun, only emailing every couple of months. They're flagging all that as spam, and that's why Gmail won't send your spam anymore.
Also a great example of leadership by lower level leaders, or higher level leaders with shorter term thinking. You see this pattern happen at bigger companies all the time.
If you're the VP or whatever in charge of the new font launch, your performance is measured on how many people pick up the new font. You are happy to sacrifice anything else your company is doing to make your launch succeed even slightly more because it is the only thing you are evaluated on. If you send out a spammy promotional email to the entire subscriber base, and it causes 20% of your email list to unsubscribe, but it also gets 2% of them to click through and buy something, that is an absolute win for you, the lower level leader. It's disastrous for the company, but that's not what you're being evaluated on.
Whenever I see a company do something that seems like it's sacrificing some long term brand trust for short term gains, I see a misincentivized middle manager.
You think your favorite app has a "WE ADDED AI" button because the users were clamoring for it? No, of course not. But some executive somewhere is being judged on customer adoption of the new AI feature, and so now the AI is the biggest button on the screen, to the detriment of the overall usability of the app.
That is the thing. If I sign up to a fonts website, I may be interested in fonts. Finding new fonts, the history of fonts, obscure lineages, how to use them, that stuff.
Give me that in a newsletter and I might read it. Give me some info about an "awesome" new "release" and lose me. That release is important for everybody working there, but outside of that it id irrelevant as a story.
Wanna sell a new industrial font? Write about interesting industrial fonts and then in the end tie it to yours. People that read that far may just click and buy.
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?
Easy, let the user opt in to email updates about new products, rather than automatically "opting" them in when you force them to use their email to create an account
> 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?
What companies _used_ to do is have "Subscribe to our newsletter" on their site - either for non-account holders, or as a separate checkbox when setting up an account.
Same with email frequency — would be trivial to add "when do you want to hear from us?" as a question "when we release a new font / when we make changes to a font you've purcahsed / only account related".
We have the patterns for all this already established.
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.
we switched email providers from our all-EU stack to gmail... just as a last desperate attempt at not being marked as spam for actually sending low volume (crazy, right).
well, now we're stuck with gmail for a year, and no, it haven't improved anything!
I've been running my own MX for my business for a couple decades. I've never had trouble with Google. Apple on the other hand...as expected are not accommodating to anyone operating outside of the Apple garden. They don't even do DMARC reports, and just point you at their policy page with no indication of why they reject some mail to icloud addresses but not others. I will say I have received specific feedback from a human at Apple after submitting an email and waiting about a month for a response. But it was shocking in how braindead and years-out-of-date their reason was for blocking some (not all!) emails from our domain.
Actually the absolute worst are the rinky dink "free email" hosting that is bundled with some cheap web hosting services, where they use the UCEPROTECT block lists. UCEPROTECT is basically a protection racket where they expect you to pay to be removed from their blocklists, and they are often the one and only blocklist a domain or IP will appear on (which indicates it is likely a false positive money grab)
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.
> If they have purchased an automatically renewing subscription we email a receipt after it renews (..) This is required by the major credit card companies.
The problem here is that "we are legally required to send it" and "our customers want to receive it" aren't necessarily the same thing. I'd probably be pretty annoyed by those if I had more than a few subscriptions!
I have a really simple algorithm to reporting something as spam:
> Was this email solicited by me?
The author describes unsolicited emails and somehow misses the point that spam is a term for unsolicited emails.
The reminder email in your list sounds unsolicited, so I'd probably report that one as spam as well. I wasn't aware it was mandatory, probably because it's not where I live.
My transactional inboxes are mostly clean as a result. My "spam" inbox, however, is full of crap (the email I use to sign up to freemium services).
I would describe myself as strict and dogmatic about email etiquette and consent as they come, but I am with avianlyric about the subscription reminders.
Legal requirements aside — when I have an ongoing business relationship with a company, "we are about to take money from you again" is an expected, useful and welcome message.
Last week, my monitoring system sent me 20k emails in a few hours in response to a server attack.
When those hit my gmail inbox, gmail marked them all as spam. Myself, the user, did not mark them as spam. Gmail did that for me. But their reputation system is behaving as if 20k people marked 20k emails from us as spam.
In response to those 20k emails marked as spam, now our domain sender reputation with gmail is LOW, and our low volume of legitimate email with customers goes to their spam folders.
The gmail client gives me no way to unmark these messages as spam, except to click on each message, one at a time, and dig into a submenu to find the "Not spam" button.
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?
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.
When I ran my own mail server, I was lucky to even make it to the gmail spam folder. More often it didn't even make it that far. From what I can tell, O365 is even worse though.
They should go through, at least to spam - but your setup needs to be flawless, meaning you need to correctly set up the 'holy trinity' SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
Sites like mail-tester.com, learndmarc.com, or sending a mail to ping@tools.mxtoolbox.com (which will reply a report to you) are pretty useful for that.
But yeah I have only limited experience I suppose. Having some mail correspondence with friends in the hopes of improving my domain's reputation to those mail servers.
Oh and btw, I relay through my cloud providers mail delivery system - doing it from your own IP is probably a whole different league.
I run my own email server on own ip since 2005. Never had any issues with gmail or M$. Changed IP at least one time, no difference from the first day on.
Just one time I had to activate SSL for inter server communication. But that was a known thing that gmail was rejecting you otherwise.
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.
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 think part of the problem is that Google has conflated the "mark as spam" button with "unsubscribe" and people just mash it as a shortcut to "make this email go away".
Most of the email that I get with an "unsubscribe" link is spam. It's not the user's problem that unethical companies decide "opt-out" is consent. It's not the user's problem that unethical companies take seconds to start spamming you but days to process an "unsubscribe" request. It's not the user's fault that companies regularly add new categories of spam users have to "opt out" from.
Unsubscribe is a trap, setting up a rule to mark every incoming email from a spamming company's domain as spam automatically is the only thing that works. Or tediously hitting the button manually, for nontechnical users.
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.
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.
MSFT has same policy. Office365 does not treat Microsoft.com emails any differently. Only exception is Office365 transactional emails.
This seems logical, you don’t want your service to get a bad rep because some internal division marketing team goes dumb. Also, security in case individuals get hacked.
> Some days it'll mark legitimate transaction emails from major companies as spam
I get legitimate transactional emails intended for someone else and those senders refuse to stop them because I'm not their customer and only their customer can request account updates. Those get marked as spam.
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.
And for the spammers: What matters for this is whether the recipient thought they opted in. No matter how clever you think you are by pre-checking that checkbox, or hiding it in the TOS, or putting the non-mandatory spam checkbox between two other clearly-mandatory checkboxes so people think it's mandatory: If the user didn't want the mails, they're going to mark your spam as spam and you'll have the deliverability problems that you deserve.
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.
I hear this often, but I'm running my mailserver since 2005, since 2009 with a additional domain, have changed my IP at least one time. I had no issues with M$ or gmail at all.
Yes, so they collected emails from users of one product and are now spamming marketing emails about a fundraising campaign for a different product.
That's at least two steps removed from being merely questionable. I'm really struggling to understand how they imagined that this wouldn't end up being blocked.
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 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.
> 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.
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
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
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.
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.
We didn't want too many fake accounts. We didn't ask for phone numbers. It's very easy to get a burner email, in case someone wanted to avoid giving the main email. Burner phone numbers are harder.
Also, an important use is password and username recovery. We even got password or username request 30 minutes after signup! They had quiz to solve if they want to help during studding and it's good to track them.
We had a lot of wrong emails, in particular it was common someone@yahoo.com instead of someone@yahoo.com.ar because Yahoo! offer both options. Also someone@gmail.com.ar that does not exist, but that never stop users.
(If it help, we never asked to confirm the email again after the registration.)
how do you prevent malicious use intentionally signing up someone else without verification? and how do you verify your own email if you are not technically competent enough to know how to spell your email correctly? (probably not an issue for students, but just seeing stories here on hackernews about people receiving emails not meant for them shows that this is an issue)
I guess whether that matters depends on the actual application. As long as it's not spamming (E-mail or phone), the impact of having an incorrect email address may be low.
If you used a username, you wouldn't have this problem. As it stands, signing up someone else's address for a lot of sites to spam them with confirmations is already an attack vector that's used in the wild. And that's legitimate spam and should be reported as spam and sites that do this are spam amplifiers.
IIRC, we don't give an automatic email for students.
I'm in the first year of the University of Buenos Aires. Everyone with a high school title can get into the First Year, no filtration before the first year. There are more than 50.000 students per year. The fist years is shared between the 13 Faculty (branches?). Each one has a different policy about the email for students. Moreover, inside each faculty each department has a different policy about the email for students (IIRC ~20 years ago in computer science every student got an email, but in math you got an email only after getting a undergraduate-TA position in ~3rd year).
Now the whole University has a deal with Microsoft so I got an email there. And also the First Year has a deal with Google so I got another email. Each faculty may self host or has another(s) deals with someone else, so I have another email in my old faculty. Three in total. I may even ask nicely to get a email as visitor in other departments/faculties, but I'm too lazy to do that. And some coworkers work in two or more faculties so add a few more emails for them.
Back to students, I have no idea how many emails they get now. Also, they may get the email a few months after the semester began, or not, I'm not sure and in the best case we definitively can wait until all the paperwork is done.
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.
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.
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]!!
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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...
> 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...
The "peak" situation for someone in the US credit card system is a bunch of cards that have been open for years, no new cards, a single used credit card with a low balance relative to credit limit, and an instalment loan/mortgage.
But yeah, people need to put at least a dollar on one of their cards every month to maintain this.
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.
That's very generous of you to even give them that opportunity. I don't even read it to see if they're trying to be funny before I mark an unsolicited marketing email as spam.
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 :))
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.
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.
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 do frequently, but I honestly can't recall the last time a message i really wanted actually ended up there. I mostly end up hitting not-spam on marketing/updates that I've actually subscribed to
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.
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.
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"
> 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...
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...
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.
>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.
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.
Seems to me that a very high percentage of people would set their agent policy to “I’m never interested in spam” and then the spammers would try to circumvent that and we’d be back where we are now except with everyone spending more computation.
If you did that then you are better off never being targeted by emails/messages by the company at all. It is in the benefit of the company to know that. Right now its a tedious unsubscribe process that requires me to keep doing it all the time and company that does not know just blasts everyone who signed up. Its a ridiculous thing to do.
This would require an inversion of dynamics based on quantification and collective realization of a couple of things:
0. Emails suffer from a "misclassification" of intent issue on a time*attention scale. Imagine time of the day/week/year on one axis and their attention on email inbox on the other. Emails have to arrive at the right (x,y) point for a user to act on. But they rarely do.
1. Well being of a user is proportional to their current state of mind to receive an message from X. Which is proportional to how likely they are to listen what you have to say.
Both of these suggest a negotiation of messages between two parties, much like when a bartender asks you if you want a refill and you can say yes/no.
for me the problem is as simple as not allowing a third party to classify what i consider spam. i do that on my own. and what i classify as spam has no bearing on anyone elses classification and vice versa.
most critically however, i would like my email client to track which email i used to subscribe somewhere. which emails are replies to emails i sent out. which senders i approve of or are in my contact list (or are addresses i set email to before). these should be overriding any global classification as spam. subscription emails should be classified as such and not as spam either.
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.
My phone network provider ran some "12 days of Christmas" promotion last year which entailed a spam email trying to hawk me crap I don't need every single day. When I tried to opt-out they told me it would take a month. I emailed the ICO and the network provider's complaints team and miraculously they were able to remove me from the mailing list immediately.
> but that it can take up to 10 days to stop receiving emails when you unsubscribe
This is a really bad business practice, people will just mark your mail as spam and the likelyhood of other people seeing your mails will drop
I still do not understand how marketers haven't understood that quality > quantity.
But often $ generated by quantity > $ generated by quality. And that’s the metric everyone really cares about.
Because a lot of the time, it isn't.
Inside the marketing org bubble, quantity is the "any moron could see that" metric. So anyone who wants to get ahead, inside that bubble, had better be willing to optimize it.
> 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.
Hmm, wouldn't you want to remove the money losing people as soon as possible, so you don't waste even more money on them?
Doesn’t compute.
He probably meant that “customer” is not making him money, therefore not worth the time. The only reason unsubscribing works at all is probably a legal requirement.
It does, probabilistically. For any given customer C, the expected value EV(C) is... not much. By starting an opt-out process, a customer Co is revealed to have EV(Co) = 0, which is less than not much.
Though it's making the other customers statistically more valuable.
It’s because transactional email and marketing email are two different systems.
That's not really relevant here. The complaint is that you start getting promotional emails right away, meaning that adding you to a mailing list is instant, but removing you somehow takes ten days. Normally you can't unsubscribe from transactional email, as they serve to provide you with information you're legally entitled to. There might be companies that are foolish enough to use the same system for both transactional and marketing email, but normally you'd never do that, because you exactly risk having things like order confirmation, recalls, invoices and so on, be tagged as spam, if it uses the same system as the marketing emails. Frequently you can use the same provider, allowing for tracking bounce rates, open indication and so on, but even if it's within the same interface or set of APIs, the two things are kept very separate on the backend. They'd at least use different email addresses, but frequently also different domains/sub-domains.
I've done both transactional and marketing emails, and I've never seen a system that could not remove a user at least within 24 hours. I can imagine one, but you're doing something very wrong at that point. Ten days is deliberate.
As the end user: not my problem, I don’t care, I don’t need the implementation details.
I only care about what I see.
Sounds like an engineering problem that can be solved, and, more importantly, not my fucking problem.
> 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.
Fuck me, that is brutal and could absolutely ruin your SES complaint rate - even with the suppression filter on, as the emails are already in your inbox.
When I worked on a notification system that sent over a billion messages a month. We received spam complaints on emails sent 6+ years ago. No correlation, just a one-off spam complaint. I always wondered why this was happening.
Probably because people like me finally had some time to go through an inbox with 20,000 unread messages. Almost anything that's been unread was either (most likely spam) or (very rarely) just simply unimportant.
Good. Don't send spam. If you're sending spam, then you clearly don't care about your complaint rate.
This is when I send them a GDPR data request followed by a deletion request. If they send me spam after, I sue them with the receipts.
I have done the opposite We had a million people enter their email over the last decade We haven’t messaged a single one.
Now we plan to start sending out a newsletter. For many, they may have forgotten downloading the app, but they might still appreciate it. If not - they can u subscribe.
Don't do that, it will be disastrous for you.
Instead, send them a politely worded one-time announcement with an invitation to subscribe. Clearly mention that if they don't, this is the last mail they'll get from you, and keep that promise by deleting their address. You'll still get some pushback, but I think most people would find that acceptable.
At least with your suggestions there's some chance that their newsletter won't instantly get flagged as spam.
I'd do what you suggest, but send the newsletter from an separate domain once subscriptions have been confirmed.
That one-time announcement is called an email. And therefore that first announcement itself can be flagged as spam.
And naturally, unless they click a link in the first email, gmail should consider anything subsequent to be spam anyway. They have no idea whether consent happened somewhere else or not.
The unsubscribe links must work without even opening the email, according to gmail rules.
What I'd be concerned with is that if you have never sent anything to these users, they might have forgotten where and when they gave you their email address and simply mark your message as spam.
We've trained users to not use "unsubscribe" because some spammers once used that to verify addresses, or they may simply click "Spam" because they forgot who you are and think you got their address illegitimately. Gmail also doesn't make unsubscribe as visible as "Spam", making flagging the easier option. So now Gmail will see some percentage of users manually flagging you as a spammer, tainting your sender. This is why I'd switch the newsletter to a new domain or at least a new sender address. That does mean preparing that new sender, give it a bit of time to mature and send a few emails to Gmail accounts you control and ensure that they are not flagged as spam.
Probably also test with a list of Gmail account you control and check if you're tagged as spam and fix that, before doing the big push.
> I'd switch the newsletter to a new domain or at least a new sender address
Big Red Flag for the spam button: newsletter comes from a different domain than it links to.
Don't switch your newsletter to a new domain. Use your domain, or don't send it.
newsletter@yourdomain.com is totally fine.
As a gmail user who may or may not have had to enter an email address to do something on the web, and who gets annoyed by spam, let me describe my decision points (anecdote is not the plural of data, of course, but here I am) when it comes to "unsubscribe" vs marking something "spam."
If your email reminds me (upfront!) how and when and why I specifically gave you (and not some other third party) my email address, and promises that you are advertising this newsletter one time, and it is opt-in, and you keep your promise, I am highly unlikely to mark it spam.
Now, this presupposes that it was really me who gave you my email address. I have a fairly generic email address because I got on gmail early. There are many variants of it, but sometimes people forget to add the trailing numbers or letters, so I get misdirected email all the time.
If the misdirected email is personal, I usually respond letting them know of the issue.
If the misdirected email shows a clear understanding that I might not have been the one who really signed up then I give them a pass.
If the misdirected email blithely assumes that I am the one who signed up, then I blithely assume that its senders are too fucking stupid to use the internet and it goes straight into the spam bucket. (And this is usually an easy call because they use the name of the person with the similar email address, which is not my name. My email address is firstinitiallastname@gmail.com and there are many different first names that start with the same initial.)
Any failure on any of those other points starts to increase the likelihood of it being marked spam, and...
> The unsubscribe links must work without even opening the email, according to gmail rules.
So here's where I'm a hard-ass and maybe even worse than google's rules.
If I see the RFC8058 unsubscribe link, it is too late. I only notice that link after I've decided to mark your email as "spam" and google asks if I'm sure, or if I merely want to unsubscribe.
Why did I decide to mark your email as spam? One possible reason is that I read through it, decided that the sender legitimately had my email address and was acting honorably, and then clicked the unsubscribe link embedded in the email.
When I do that, one of two things happens. Either I get some form of "thank you, you've been unsubscribed" or nothing happens because the sender assumes that I am OK with them executing javascript on my computer.
This is a privilege I jealously guard and only reluctantly offer to as few websites as possible.
Even if I previously gave you my email address, that did not come with an open invitation to use my computing resources for your own purposes.
So by your own description, ANYONE sending you a newsletter, by complying with Google’s rules, they piss you off and make you mark their email as SPAM because, according to you, they made “javascript execute on your computer”. Actually, gmail is the one executing tons of javascript. The mandatory unsubscribe LINK uses HTTP, not even HTML. Google just requires that the unsubscribe instant.
It is an unwinnable situation.
With all respect, why would I care what an impossibly hardass tech person would do if I sent them an email in an unwinnable situation? The vast majority of our users are not this technical, let alone a hardass HN denizen who advertises the fact that the mere compliance with Google’s rules will piss them off due to a misunderstanding of how unsubcribe works.
Here is what we might both agree on: email sucks. You shouldn’t be reachable by anyone who just has your address, and it is not your job to be vigilant. Then all these problems go away.
> So by your own description, ANYONE sending you a newsletter, by complying with Google’s rules, they piss you off and make you mark their email as SPAM because, according to you, they made “javascript execute on your computer”.
Are you deliberately being obtuse, or is it natural? I don't need to use gmail's web interface if I don't want to, but as it happens, I do let google's javascript execute on my computer.
> The mandatory unsubscribe LINK uses HTTP, not even HTML.
Two links are required. One in the header, and one in the email. As I wrote, if I read to the end of the email to make a decision, then I will click on the link in the email. Which often goes to a webpage with javascript on it.
> It is an unwinnable situation.
Did I write that I mark everything as spam? No? Why not, I wonder? Did it ever occur to you that if I am describing when I mark things as spam, that there are things that I don't mark as spam? No? Do you even read what you yourself write? No? You should try it sometime.
> With all respect, why would I care what an impossibly hardass tech person would do if I sent them an email in an unwinnable situation?
With all respect, if you wrongly believe the rules I gave are unwinnable, you shouldn't care. I won't be receiving further missives from you, and nature will take its course in determining whether I was an outlier or the canary in the coalmine.
To quote your own words:
>So here's where I'm a hard-ass and maybe even worse than google's rules. If I see the RFC8058 unsubscribe link, it is too late. I only notice that link after I've decided to mark your email as "spam" and google asks if I'm sure, or if I merely want to unsubscribe.
The way I read it, this is an unwinnable situation. We must supply this link, in order to comply with Google's rules. If you see this link, it's too late. You're making it as spam. Because I may run javascript on your computer.
Having re-read it, it sounds instead like: you're likely mark it as spam before you get to this link (even though the web interface surfaces the unsubscribe button right in the list of emails -- but you don't use that interface).
Well, I guess there is a narrow path to "victory": mention that it may have been someone else who signed up, then if you see the unsubscribe link, you click it, then I'm supposed to say "thank you" and not serve any javascript. Anything else, and you click SPAM. Or maybe you already did.
> The way I read it, this is an unwinnable situation. We must supply this link, in order to comply with Google's rules. If you see this link, it's too late.
That's an obtuse reading.
I am looking at the email. The email has a different link, mandated by the can-spam act in it.
Gmail has a bunch of icons at the top. There is not one for "unsubscribe".
So, I read your email, decide it is legitimate but I am not interested. I click on the link (not RFC8058) in the body of the email message itself to unsubscribe.
If that link takes me to a page that does nothing because it wants to execute javascript on my computer, then we are done.
Look, I'm not a terrible writer and this isn't that difficult.
> Well, I guess there is a narrow path to "victory": mention that it may have been someone else who signed up, then if you see the unsubscribe link, you click it, then I'm supposed to say "thank you" and not serve any javascript.
Oh, well, you did understand. Sort of. Except I view this as a common-sensical extremely wide path. If it's the first time that you're emailing me, you damn well better realize that it might have been a fake signup, and how the fuck am I supposed to know your intentions if you attempt to serve javascript? What part of removing me from your database requires you to execute shit on my computer?
And by the way, about this part of that statement:
> if you see the unsubscribe link
If you're playing "hide the link" then you've already shown that your intentions aren't honorable.
> Anything else, and you click SPAM.
I don't actually click spam all that often. Only on, you know, spam.
Look, you're the one who mentioned that you might have collected some of these email addresses 10 years ago. I'm just giving you a heads-up. Not only may they have forgotten about signing up, but the addresses themselves might have been recycled by now.
> Or maybe you already did.
Nope. I've been upfront and transparent. I thought you were being that way, too, given your first comment. I even upvoted it because I thought all the downvoting was a bit excessive.
But the intransigence and mischaracterization here is stunning.
Look, there are two possibilities here. (1) is that I'm not that extreme, in which case you're probably fucked. (2) is that, yes, I'm an outlier, and if you satisfy my needs, then you probably won't have enough emails marked spam to trigger google's filters.
Now, if you truly feel that my conditions offer only a narrow path to victory, then you're probably not really someone I should be offering this advice to in any case, because our interests are not congruent. My only solace is that maybe you won't take the advice and you'll receive a banning for your efforts.
> Instead, send them a politely worded one-time announcement with an invitation to subscribe.
NO. DO NOT DO THAT !
That is terrible advice and it is against the law.
Opt-in has to be done without inducement and of a person's own volition.
Sending a mail to someone saying "pretty please sign up" is not valid opt-in. It is spamming a bunch of people hoping they will opt-in. It does not matter if you got their mail another way (e.g. if they purchased a product, you can't then spam them trying to get them to opt-in for your mailing list).
One of the fundamental reasons the opt-in law exists is to stop people doing the shit you suggest and ensure that lists are correctly built in a clean manner.
Under GDPR, can someone send an email to people who 1) downloaded our app, 2) voluntarily entered their email, viewing a message that says if they do that, we can send them a newsletter about how to be more efficient with the app, and 3) selected what kind of person they are, e.g. a teacher, marketer, etc.
But it's been 10 years. Can we send them a newsletter now with an unsubscribe link? Does GDPR have an expiration date on that stuff? Yes it was affirmatively opt-in.
> over the last decade
Be aware that under various regulations, you're potentially already at risk of accusation in terms of unwarranted data retention. If you haven't got a good reason to have kept those email addresses, something like the GDPR might not interpret that favourably. While the GDPR doesn't specify actual time limits, they are expected to be proportionate. Financial records are generally 7 years unless otherwise legally required, so for a decade, you would be saying that these email addresses are more critical/valid than that. That may be the case, I don't know your business, but be careful if you don't want some very awkward questions asked. Just the hassle of having to deal with complaints you might get (and various regulators would take notice of 1 million instances) is likely to be more than it's worth for most.
The suggestion downthread to send a very clear "we still have your address, would you like to opt in to this newsletter, otherwise we'll remove it" is not a bad one, but even then, some people will object to you still having it at all.
People originally opted in and provided it expecting to get a newsletter on how to use the app. We never seemed to have the bandwidth to create a good enough one, so we never sent it. We kept improving the app until it became very good and still never sent the emails. But retained the addresses, so that one day we could tell people the app has improved, to give it a try, include animated GIFs of it in action and gradually educate them on ways to use it. For that I get chastizement on HN, figures.
Yes, there is a clearly valid business purpose under GDPR for retaining the email addresses of users who want to learn how to use your app better and opted in. If you plan to send a newsletter out.
Other than those voluntarily entered emails (which aren’t even linked to the user), we haven’t retained literally any information about our users, despite having millions of users download and use the app over a decade. Which is far beyond pretty much any social app I know. But almost no one actually cares.
> For that I get chastizement on HN, figures.
I really wasn't trying to chastize, honestly it was intended as a friendly dollop of advice as someone who's dealt with this kind of thing. But since you have replied, I would say:
> Yes, there is a clearly valid business purpose under GDPR for retaining the email addresses of users who want to learn how to use your app better and opted in.
Relevance is likely to be seen as contextual. Someone wishing to do something a full decade ago is not likely to be seen as sufficient evidence to justify contacting them now in case they still wish to. That's a big chunk of the point about time-limiting data retention - the data gets less relevant and more problematic over time. I get that you're not trying to colour outside the lines here, but from the perspective of your users, and anyone looking at their potential complaints from a regulatory perspective, the window in which they reasonably consented to contact has closed (and probably some time ago).
The regulations are there, ostensibly, to protect consumers. They will be interpreted in that light. I can almost guarantee that if you sent an email to your downloader base 10 years after they last heard from you, being ignored will be the best case, and the worst will be reports to local regulators.
Is there an actual regulation or case law showing what the cutoff time is du jure?
I would be glad to respect it if there was.
As it is, laws do allow for things they didn’t explicitly prohibit, and especially good-faith things like welcoming people to try the free app again, which they themselves downloaded and asked to be exucated about, since it’s improved, and showing them how and why to use the improvements.
Yeah, that's fair enough, and it is annoying that there is rarely a specific time set in regulation (or even case law which is broadly applicable). Most regulatory bodies will tend to say things like "as short as required/possible" for retention, which is clearly open to interpretation [0].
I would personally see 10 years as "a long time" in this kind of context (although that may be contextual depending on what your product does, obviously). If you can honestly claim/show good faith, that is usually acknowledged, but my point was rather how it would be seen out of the blue from an organisation that has been silent for 10 years (my personal first thought would be "why the hell have they still got my information?", but I am well aware that I'm not the average).
Genuinely, I don't mean to imply bad faith on your part, only to suggest the reactions it may receive, and how careful you should be with your messaging.
[0]: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...
>Is there an actual regulation or case law showing what the cutoff time is du jure? I would be glad to respect it if there was.
I'm sorry but what sort of BS excuse is that ?
The whole point is that YOU are supposed to know: a) What data you have b) What you need it for
It is simply not possible for data protection law to spell out an exact cut-off time because there are so many permutations.
For example, if its for tax reasons then you need to keep it for the duration dictated by tax laws.
But if its email addresses you randomly harvested a decade ago, I think every man and his dog would agree that a decade is too long. Even more so if there is a material difference in permitted use of the harvested address.
P.S. There is no such thing as "good-faith things" in GDPR legislation. Please don't make shit up.
My reaction would be to report spam with a vengeance
So you’re retrospectively assuming consent? Gross.
No, the consent was given, recorded, and never acted upon. It had no expiration date. Many of those people are still using the app today.
> It had no expiration date
- non-legally speaking, consent for anything is never illimited in time. So whatever the law says, you're probably doing a dick move, I'm sure you can conceive that most people you're going to email would rather not get this email and you're planning to do it anyway. So if you act against these people's interest, don't be surprised if they react negatively (reporting the email as spam, complaining, reporting you to authorities)
- legally speaking... IANAL, but I don't think that you're correct that you have a legal basis to have kept this data, and even less to use it for marketing purposes. I don't think that you'd win the argument that the consent is still "informed" after many years of not hearing from you. If a reasonable person would no longer expect to hear from this company, then I don't think you still have consent under GDPR (could be wrong, IANAL)
So basically — you are affirming the point of the OP whose article was shared.
Wait too long — respect people’s attention and time so much that you don’t send them anything unless it is ready and benefits them - and apparently it’s spam when you finally do contact them. Meanwhile, if you were just drip feeding them slop once a month, then you’re fine.
I happen to agree with the article author, the email ecosystem is totally broken, that’s far more of a problem than small teams who have well-meaning intentions and respect for their users’ time. You’re blaming the victim, rather than the email system that’s open to SPAM and dominated by gmail.
Most consent doesn't work like this in people's minds (never mind what you "recorded"). I'd be furious and immediately flag as spam and review the app 1 star (if possible) for good measure.
Complete assumption on your part.
It was a question with an assumed answer which I think is pretty likely. It wasn’t presented as fact.
I think at this point it’s pretty reasonable to assume the worst of email marketers, and I don’t care if you think otherwise :)
Sure. I took it as I think you intended - a statement of your understanding. I guess I just was irritated in, the moment as people are constantly reacting to unverified assumptions when there are many real things to react to. Apologies if I added to the pile of annoying things on the internet for you!
Oh my God don't do that
What percentage of those million still use your app?
What percentage of those million remember the existence of your app?
Unless you're sure both of those are VERY high, you would be an absolute imbecile to spam 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. I'll see a whole page of categories and somehow the last one will be enabled even though I'm sure I'd have turned them all off when I disabled the bulk of them.
True.
Another worse offender is gitlab. They send promotions hidden as a part of this is obligatory account related into telling blah blah and adding BTW see these extra features for more payments.
Not just gitlab. I'm seeing this happen more and more. I'm assuming it relies on the fact that it's a nontrivial investment to file a government complaint.
Or add junk to existing categories. Amazon are sending me a ton of notifications for their “Haul” shop but I have absolutely zero interest in the cheapest made shit. No way to turn off those notifications without disabling the entire category.
LinkedIn does this and it is annoying
I recently tried disabling notification in LinkedIn. The designers and engineers working there who created the notifications settings are truly evil. You have to go through 14 categories. Some of them let you toggle the whole category at once, some don't. Some categories are split into 8 more subcategories.
I just flag as spam in my email client and it takes care of all future emails.
Linkedin sends you notifications an emails for having other unread notifications without any additional info. It's really the worst.
"Someone viewed your profile" with a blurred photo of them.
So you know exactly who it is, but you won't just tell me in the email? I have to open the app/site so you can tick your engagement box for the day?
So glad I'm off that shit hole. It's just full of pompous picks anyway.
To this day I do not have a LinkedIn account because they have historically been the most aggressive spammers of any company. The year I graduated college, almost 2/3 of the e-mails I received were LinkedIn spam.
"Terms of use" update emails seem to be a new way to remind you about a service too.
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.
The Honda thing sounds more like a technical limitation for the feature to work than a way to get permission for malicious reasons.
My fucking public transport app does that, it's incredibly irritating. And all the notifications I get are lotto ads.
Stripe does this to me and it's starting to get annoying. They offer an unsubscribe option to remove you from current mailing lists but perpetually have you auto added to new mailing lists effectively making the unsubscribe option useless.
I wrote about this recently: https://honeypot.net/2026/03/12/one-of-our-credit-card.html
We got political spam from one of our credit card issuers. It ended with this BS:
> ABOUT THIS EMAIL: This email was sent by [lender] to provide important account servicing information regarding your [lender] account. You may receive account servicing emails even if you have requested not to receive marketing offers by email for your [lender] account.
That outright lie had me ready to toss a brick through their front door. I haven’t been that righteously furious in ages.
Intel did this to me with a job application... they just sent tons of promo shit even after I unsubscribed
And people wonder why I make unique email addresses for every site and even multiple for some sites. It's for exactly this (and to see who's selling it). My only real recourse is to delete the email address. Thanks mozmail, and thanks bitwarden for integrating. But it's also dumb as shit that we have to do things like this.
> And people wonder why I make unique email addresses for every site and even multiple for some sites.
This, right here, is the solution.
It's not a solution, it is a defense. A solution would not require the action in the first place. It is a shitty thing that we have to act this way and we shouldn't be complacent with our defenses. The solution is to make a world where we don't need to constantly defend.
I do the same. Gmail gives me a single, standardized interface for opting out of emails: mark it as spam. All the various companies I've given my email to, on the other hand, give me different, either clunky or often outright broken interfaces for opting out. There's no direct financial incentive for them to invest in making ethical, robust opt-out systems.
However well meaning, collectively all those companies are still just a bunch of sociopaths. This might be a bit dark, but I think a reasonable real world analogy here is stalkers and restraining orders. A stalker isn't motivated to listen to you when you tell them to stop talking to you. That's why you get the restraining order.
I've noticed the same. Companies are disguising what are obviously marketing, advertising, or promotional content as "transactional." Experian is probably the most famous of these offenders. They send "transactional" emails every month that can't be opted out of when they notice changes in my credit file (everyone's credit file changes every month almost by definition!) It's scummy, intentional, and IMO breaking the law.
> They send "transactional" emails every month that can't be opted out of when they notice changes in my credit file
And you can't even try to unsubscribe without creating an account. And, if I don't _have_ an account, it is (pretty much by definition) NOT transactional.
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 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.
But that same exact logic applies to "it's really hard to succeed, so I'm going to just mug some people to get the money I need". I'm sorry, but "its hard to succeed, so I'm justified in being unethical" is _not_ a valid excuse.
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.
Get this through your head: I. do. not. want. to. be. in. a. relationship. with. you. Using your product or service one time is not consent. Finding partners is hard, but that is no reason to propose marriage on the first date, and that strategy will not work well. No means no.
>Do you know how exceedingly hard it is to grow a business
how is this my problem? Do you think wanting to be one of the cool entrepreneurs is a right or something? I don't care if the in your words shameless hustle goes under because you're spamming my mail with your fifteenth startup idea, that's my attention you're wasting, go get a real job.
I'll take trustworthy big business over shameless small business, I hope Google filters more of the stuff. I'm always astonished by people who try to justify their sketchy business practices with their underdog status. Those are by the way the exact same people who, once they succeed, do what they accuse Google of
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.
> A consumer will pay $10/mo and
> ask for the moon. Threaten to leave.
That's normal business thing. What significantly helps reducing this, though, is the business is not promising the stars and engaging in all kinds of dark patterns with deals, cancellation friction, etc.
> Get angry at an email.
Particularly e-mail they did not ask for, and is not directly related to the thing they're paying $10/mo for.
>You're all angry at the wrong people.
No. We're not. Perhaps we should be angry at both, but we definitely should be angry at you.
Spam is bad. If your business can't survive without sending spam, your business shouldn't survive.
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.
> Every fashion brand on the planet reengages their customers this way and it works.
I often receive emails from (among other things) fashion brands to which I never subscribed. There are clearly multiple people worldwide who, mistakenly or intentionally, are giving my `firstname.lastname@gmail.com` at checkout or whatever rather than their own.
Every time I receive one of those emails I do two things:
1. Use their unsubscribe link on a private window, connecting with a VPN exit point in their country (or nearby). If asked, I select the "I never subscribed" or "This is spam" option.
2. Mark the email as spam on GMail, rejecting GMail's proposal to unsubscribe instead (as I already did).
I have no mercy and feel no guilt at reducing their email server's reputation. The only exceptions I make are the rare emails that ask me to confirm "my" subscription before sending "me" their stuff. That I respect, and I just ignore and delete.
Reengaging customers is not gaining customers. I haven't been an engineer all my life, but I've been "on the ground" that entire time and I sure have gained a lot of disdain for a lot of companies because they won't stop emailing me.
If a company sends me mail and I don't remember allowing them to, I will not trust them and will not use the unsubscribe button, because using it signals to the sender that my address is valid. I will mark as spam.
The onus for clearly communicating that you are going to mail me anything other than transaction updates is with the sender, not the receiver.
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"?
That's a bit carried away, don't you think?
There are unsubscribe buttons with laws that enforce that they work.
Meanwhile hyperscalers are constantly in your eyes and ears and they have a million ways to bypass those regulations and get into your headspace regardless.
Your URL bar is an ad. Your phone default settings and push notifications are ads. Your app store is an ad. Every new feature or OS update is an ad. Your new tab screen is an ad. Your browser updates are ads.
Dollars are spent on attention. You don't make it in this world without securing some attention.
Some have worked themselves into a place of eternal captive attention, everyone else is either climbing the mountain or running the treadmill.
And all those employees' livelihoods depend on it working. Otherwise they starve.
Be thankful you, as presumably an engineer, don't have to be exposed to this game. It's Darwinian and adversarial, zero sum, a fight to survive.
Maybe you're happy working for someone who does all this work for you or figured out a tiny niche where it isn't necessary. But reality is much different.
> Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"?
I purchase a product from company X. They require an email and will not let me buy without it. I actually do want an email confirmation that the order went through and even that my product shipped.
I do not want emails about "we released a new thing" or "we have a sale" or "it's Tuesday and we want you to remember we exist". Signing me up without an explicit opt-in using information you required me to provide is absolutely unethical.
"X is even worse" does not make Y ethical, good, or acceptable. What your least favorite corporations do isn't relevant.
Other people are inconsiderate monsters who litter in national parks and abandon mattresses on the side of the road. BP and Exxon did more damage to the environment than I ever could. It's still unethical if I drop my garbage on the ground.
> Dollars are spent on attention. You don't make it in this world without securing some attention.
I love your word choice here. "Securing" almost perfectly defines it, because you are acting with hostility against the person whose attention you are seeking to capture.
Exactly. Like most "growth hackers," they assume that our attention is their resource to consume, and we should all be grateful for the privilege of making them rich.
No thanks. I reject this as the abusive practice and mentality that it is.
> Your URL bar is an ad. Your phone default settings and push notifications are ads. Your app store is an ad. Every new feature or OS update is an ad. Your new tab screen is an ad. Your browser updates are ads.
How do you define ads? Those are not ads in my book. An update is not an ad, I can't think of any valid interpretation of that other than "existence is an ad because people who interact with it might want to do do again" but at that point the word "ad" has lost all useful meaning.
> An update is not an ad
To be fair, I think echelon was calling out that there are absolutely ads in browser updates now. "Try Firefox VPN!" "Look what's new in Chrome!", etc.
> Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"?
In some countries it's not just "unethical", but outright illegal. Laws and rules vary, but all is equal to the spam button and the whims of those wielding it.
>Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"?
I never consent to advertising. If I receive an advertisement, that means it was forced on me. Which I consider unethical.
> Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"?
The premise is that people are specifically opting OUT of those emails. Feel free to keep "hustling", feel free to treat people as resources to exploit, just don't be shocked and upset when those resources treat you like a parasite to be removed from their lives without concern for your financial wellbeing.
> There are unsubscribe buttons with laws that enforce that they work.
They don't. Period. Full Stop. There are tons of companies that I have told to stop sending me emails that just... continue to do so. And some that won't _allow_ me to tell them to stop (I need to create an account to tell them not to email me... but they shouldn't be emailing me if I don't have an account).
So no, they don't work.
> Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"?
Unless I asked for it, it is both unethical and will turn me as potential customer away, and it is illegal (GDPR).
A lot of y'all treat customers like shit - spam them, engage in dark patterns, constantly try to upsell, ask them to fill out surveys before they've completed a single purchase - then act surprised when businesses have to lay off or go under.
> Do you know how exceedingly hard it is to grow a business
This reminds me of a local bricks and mortar small business that closed down and the wife posted a completely tone deaf:
"It is a horrible shame that our long sought out dream had to die because the local "community" was not willing to support it."
I missed the part where "community" meant we are obligated to expend our own resources for your profit.
Doubly galling was the fact that there was generally "his n hers" G Wagons parked out front of their business. Doing better than 95% of the community and still pissed that the community wasn't giving them more.
Small business is brutal, isn't it?
You're fighting small biz and accept the world big tech has created to extort all of us.
You'd yell at that local brick and mortar for sending you a half off coupon in your email because it's spam, but my guess is you're fine with perpetual smartphone upgrades and not owning the entire vertical taxation and lock-in stack.
We're allowing ourselves to become serfs of big business that would no sooner outsource or lay us off.
The puzzling moral superiority is what really gets me.
Just don't complain when your tech company lays you off or your job has been automated out of existence. You might have to learn what hustle and sales really are.
I have no problem with small business, but it seems like you have a chip on your shoulder and completely failed to miss the point. But, in case it wasn't clear - a husband and wife couple, who already appear to be more successful than the vast majority of the community they're in, actually going so far as to get pissed off at the community for not making them even richer. "The "community" (bonus points for the snarky air quotes) was UNWILLING to support OUR dream" they posted, from the front seat of their $200,000 SUVs.
Now, explain to me why I am somehow obligated to support their business?
You're asking for others to take abuse on your behalf because your needs are more important than theirs. You're abusive. Stop coping and admit the truth. You're part of the problem but wrapping it in victimhood.
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.
During a 1 month period (2024-03-26 to 2024-04-25) FontAwesome sent me 18 different marketing emails, including 4 in one day. I am not sure that matches with their supposed 'instinct' and I am unsurprised that they have a bad email reputation.
Off-topic: you're the same famfamfam that used to have a really great set of flag icons years ago? Thank you for that, I used it on a project and it was totally awesome.
Every single spam email ever sent is from someone who has “something fun to share” that they’re “excited about”.
If that’s really what you’re doing, show the open/click rates well above 80%.
I don't mind if a company sends me emails if I gave them my email address. As long as, when I click "unsubscribe" to the email, they stop. I don't want to have to go log back into their system and unsubscribe. I just want to click the unsubscribe button and have it be done - forever, not just until they add a new category for email.
I have a fair number of companies that send me emails (because I signed up for their service) on a "slow" basis (ie, when they have something interesting.. not just "every week, so you don't forget us). I don't mind those. Sometimes I read them, sometimes I don't. I don't unsubscribe and I don't mark them as spam.
I'm not saying you should be the same as me. I _am_ saying that, just because _you_ don't like it, doesn't make them "clearly in the wrong". Because there are people that feel like the way they are acting is reasonable.
> log back into their system and unsubscribe
FYI, requiring logging in to unsubscribe is a violation of the CAN-SPAM Act in the U.S., I just mark those as spam if they don't allow one-click unsubscribes.
I kinda don't mind period, since I just mark them as spam. As OP is finding out though they're in denial
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...
That is standard practice because you will need to cycle that marketing domain until the end of time as its email reputation sinks into the abyss. Because people don’t want spam.
It's good practice because sometimes I don't feel like hitting the Spam button but I still want to black-hole the marketing e-mails. If you are also sending transaction e-mails through that address, then I have to decide whether to bother keeping you as a sender.
So many of these "freemium" things will spam you relentlessly asking you to upgrade.
This one doesn't have the best history either, although it's officially open source, at least at one point the build system was private[0]. I've not kept up with the drama, so I have no idea if that is still the case.
[0] https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/issues/12199#iss...
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 no longer even unsubscribe when I get an unsolicited email. I intentionally stay subscribed but mark everything as spam. My hope is if people start doing this there will be more and more instances like this post, which is a good thing. Stop emailing me. Stop opting me in. And stop pretending like you're doing it for my benefit.
> This isn't necessary for me to use the icons.
True, but all the information about non-kit deployments is available lower on the page.
Yeah but that doesn't matter. The misdirection about needing the email address to download is working as intended, getting unwilling subscribers who then mark you as spam when they see your emails, and you get blackholed.
The solution isn't a legalese CYA "but there's an alternative", it's to only sign up people who want to hear from you.
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.
Oh you want to unsubscribe? Sure, we've unsubscribed you from "Summer special 2025 marketing list", bye!
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.
If I didn't intentionally request non-transactional mail, it is spam. By definition.
Mark it as such.
I assume the unsubscribe link is malicious - if I didn't ask to be subscribed, why would I trust an unsubscribe link? Spam baby spam.
I unsubscribe twice (allowing for one possible bug), then spam.
And, as others have noted, unsubscribe cannot involving going and logging into their system. If I need to do that, it generally goes directly to spam.
I unsubscribe, and immediately set up a filter to mark any email from their (sub)domain as spam. Too many sites keep spamming for a week or two after unsubscribing, that behavior deserves a reputation drop.
For whatever it's worth, I doubt that filtering to the spam label automatically has the same feedback effect in Gmail as a manual spam mark.
Another one I've been seeing more often is a missing unsub link and instead a "Manage Email Preferences" link.
Which of course you click and then have to go through a number of hoops to log in, confirm Email address, authenticate, etc.
At this point, I just mark those as spam as well.
I'm well aware that some spam also use unsubscribe links as a signal to spam more. I use my gut to decide if I mark as spam and/or block or try the unsubscribe link if it exists.
My gut says unsolicited marketing emails, from popular sites I've never used before, like Brooks Brothers or Robinhood (especially after a "Welcome to ${site}!") or US public school event notification emails are all probably legit mistakes.
I could see even a public school system having issues with getting flagged as spam if they don't include an easy method to unsubscribe because then marking as spam+blocking becomes the best option in response to wrong address.
> Do they have an easy-to-unsubscribe link in the marketing spam
I've noticed a recent trend where unsubscribing actually does nothing
I've long noticed an old trend where subscribing somehow works instantly, but unsubscribing takes "60-90 days to process."
Yeah, the spin on that used to be "that's because we plan our campaigns in advance and use partners to handle them and we have to submit a final list and..." (insert several different types of horseshit here that might survive a passing glance but little more than that).
I've worked in the space. That sort of stuff is true (incredibly), but it's also not consumers' problem.
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.
> Identify each subscription list by including a human-readable identifier in each message 'List-ID:' header or use a unique 'From:' address to send messages for different subscriptions. This means each mailing list used to send subscription messages should have its own unique 'From:' address.
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15263077
Constantly receiving email from one alias is fine since it signals a subscription-like communications. Recycling through different aliases for the same recepient is surefire way to get flagged.
If you want to "personalize" the email, just add the name of the marketer in the subject or footer.
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.
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.
People who are such fans that they want to know will find out - I refresh https://toolguyd.com/ multiple times a week because I do want to know what crazy shit Ryobi and others are up to. But I’m rare.
> We buy it to be a tool in our toolkit, not the center of our lives.
Somehow this thought evades almost all software providers nowadays. Distracting, and in equal amount, obstructing self promotions and unwanted hints are the norm, which is making life worse, not better. Then why paying them to annoy us? Somehow this very basic thought is not there, not a bit in most of the cases. They want to be the center of our attention. Idiotic. (I do not ask for forgiveness for this strong word. I believe that the costly - and eventually paid by us - marketing teams are dumb copycats senselessly pushing bad practices established elsewhere through time. I do not dare trying to find exceptions, it is hard.)
> 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.
This is a simple case of "we" and "you" having different points of view. Sure, "we" think we have something fun to share, big news, we haven't emailed in a couple of months so users are probably anxious to hear from us. "You," the user, is getting 20 emails a day from people who think they are sharing something fun, only emailing every couple of months. They're flagging all that as spam, and that's why Gmail won't send your spam anymore.
About the clearest case of "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Also a great example of leadership by lower level leaders, or higher level leaders with shorter term thinking. You see this pattern happen at bigger companies all the time.
If you're the VP or whatever in charge of the new font launch, your performance is measured on how many people pick up the new font. You are happy to sacrifice anything else your company is doing to make your launch succeed even slightly more because it is the only thing you are evaluated on. If you send out a spammy promotional email to the entire subscriber base, and it causes 20% of your email list to unsubscribe, but it also gets 2% of them to click through and buy something, that is an absolute win for you, the lower level leader. It's disastrous for the company, but that's not what you're being evaluated on.
Whenever I see a company do something that seems like it's sacrificing some long term brand trust for short term gains, I see a misincentivized middle manager.
You think your favorite app has a "WE ADDED AI" button because the users were clamoring for it? No, of course not. But some executive somewhere is being judged on customer adoption of the new AI feature, and so now the AI is the biggest button on the screen, to the detriment of the overall usability of the app.
That is the thing. If I sign up to a fonts website, I may be interested in fonts. Finding new fonts, the history of fonts, obscure lineages, how to use them, that stuff.
Give me that in a newsletter and I might read it. Give me some info about an "awesome" new "release" and lose me. That release is important for everybody working there, but outside of that it id irrelevant as a story.
Wanna sell a new industrial font? Write about interesting industrial fonts and then in the end tie it to yours. People that read that far may just click and buy.
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?
Easy, let the user opt in to email updates about new products, rather than automatically "opting" them in when you force them to use their email to create an account
> 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?
What companies _used_ to do is have "Subscribe to our newsletter" on their site - either for non-account holders, or as a separate checkbox when setting up an account.
Same with email frequency — would be trivial to add "when do you want to hear from us?" as a question "when we release a new font / when we make changes to a font you've purcahsed / only account related".
We have the patterns for all this already established.
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...
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.
I think Gmail doesn’t want you to use their service for sending email; they want you to have to advertise ‘with’ them.
we switched email providers from our all-EU stack to gmail... just as a last desperate attempt at not being marked as spam for actually sending low volume (crazy, right).
well, now we're stuck with gmail for a year, and no, it haven't improved anything!
I've been running my own MX for my business for a couple decades. I've never had trouble with Google. Apple on the other hand...as expected are not accommodating to anyone operating outside of the Apple garden. They don't even do DMARC reports, and just point you at their policy page with no indication of why they reject some mail to icloud addresses but not others. I will say I have received specific feedback from a human at Apple after submitting an email and waiting about a month for a response. But it was shocking in how braindead and years-out-of-date their reason was for blocking some (not all!) emails from our domain.
Actually the absolute worst are the rinky dink "free email" hosting that is bundled with some cheap web hosting services, where they use the UCEPROTECT block lists. UCEPROTECT is basically a protection racket where they expect you to pay to be removed from their blocklists, and they are often the one and only blocklist a domain or IP will appear on (which indicates it is likely a false positive money grab)
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.
> If they have purchased an automatically renewing subscription we email a receipt after it renews (..) This is required by the major credit card companies.
The problem here is that "we are legally required to send it" and "our customers want to receive it" aren't necessarily the same thing. I'd probably be pretty annoyed by those if I had more than a few subscriptions!
> I'd probably be pretty annoyed by those if I had more than a few subscriptions!
That's what email filters are supposed to be for. They aren't "spam".
I have a really simple algorithm to reporting something as spam:
> Was this email solicited by me?
The author describes unsolicited emails and somehow misses the point that spam is a term for unsolicited emails.
The reminder email in your list sounds unsolicited, so I'd probably report that one as spam as well. I wasn't aware it was mandatory, probably because it's not where I live.
My transactional inboxes are mostly clean as a result. My "spam" inbox, however, is full of crap (the email I use to sign up to freemium services).
You don’t want people reminding you that their about to charge you money and give you an opportunity to cancel the subscription?
Surely that’s a lot less hassle for all involved than having to get your bank to issue chargebacks on subscription renewals you forgot about?
I would describe myself as strict and dogmatic about email etiquette and consent as they come, but I am with avianlyric about the subscription reminders.
Legal requirements aside — when I have an ongoing business relationship with a company, "we are about to take money from you again" is an expected, useful and welcome message.
if you are a big Google adwords customer you ask them to let you spam users
that is the idea of the Gmail business. it's not complicated.
This is not always the case.
Last week, my monitoring system sent me 20k emails in a few hours in response to a server attack.
When those hit my gmail inbox, gmail marked them all as spam. Myself, the user, did not mark them as spam. Gmail did that for me. But their reputation system is behaving as if 20k people marked 20k emails from us as spam.
In response to those 20k emails marked as spam, now our domain sender reputation with gmail is LOW, and our low volume of legitimate email with customers goes to their spam folders.
The gmail client gives me no way to unmark these messages as spam, except to click on each message, one at a time, and dig into a submenu to find the "Not spam" button.
The web client has a select all option, and when one or more emails is selected, two buttons pop up. Delete forever, mark as not spam.
I check my spam folder regularly and it has been this way for as far as I can remember.
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?
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.
When I ran my own mail server, I was lucky to even make it to the gmail spam folder. More often it didn't even make it that far. From what I can tell, O365 is even worse though.
They should go through, at least to spam - but your setup needs to be flawless, meaning you need to correctly set up the 'holy trinity' SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
Sites like mail-tester.com, learndmarc.com, or sending a mail to ping@tools.mxtoolbox.com (which will reply a report to you) are pretty useful for that.
But yeah I have only limited experience I suppose. Having some mail correspondence with friends in the hopes of improving my domain's reputation to those mail servers.
Oh and btw, I relay through my cloud providers mail delivery system - doing it from your own IP is probably a whole different league.
I run my own email server on own ip since 2005. Never had any issues with gmail or M$. Changed IP at least one time, no difference from the first day on. Just one time I had to activate SSL for inter server communication. But that was a known thing that gmail was rejecting you otherwise.
No question this was LLM. It absolutely stinks of it.
Totally sounds like an LLM wrote it. Should have been two paragraphs instead of this verbose drivel.
Yes, it was. Recent Claudes absolutely love to spam an endless stream of very short sentences like this.
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 think part of the problem is that Google has conflated the "mark as spam" button with "unsubscribe" and people just mash it as a shortcut to "make this email go away".
Most of the email that I get with an "unsubscribe" link is spam. It's not the user's problem that unethical companies decide "opt-out" is consent. It's not the user's problem that unethical companies take seconds to start spamming you but days to process an "unsubscribe" request. It's not the user's fault that companies regularly add new categories of spam users have to "opt out" from.
Unsubscribe is a trap, setting up a rule to mark every incoming email from a spamming company's domain as spam automatically is the only thing that works. Or tediously hitting the button manually, for nontechnical users.
In the android app when I hit report spam, a dialog pops up suggesting I try to unsubscribe first, and shows both buttons
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?
Something like, "We have only good intentions! It's not like we're selling penis pills!"
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.
Make email reputation a performance metric for upper-level managers, and the situation will improve within hours.
MSFT has same policy. Office365 does not treat Microsoft.com emails any differently. Only exception is Office365 transactional emails.
This seems logical, you don’t want your service to get a bad rep because some internal division marketing team goes dumb. Also, security in case individuals get hacked.
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.
> Some days it'll mark legitimate transaction emails from major companies as spam
I get legitimate transactional emails intended for someone else and those senders refuse to stop them because I'm not their customer and only their customer can request account updates. Those get marked as spam.
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.
Opt-out is not consent. If I didn't opt in, I mark it as spam.
And for the spammers: What matters for this is whether the recipient thought they opted in. No matter how clever you think you are by pre-checking that checkbox, or hiding it in the TOS, or putting the non-mandatory spam checkbox between two other clearly-mandatory checkboxes so people think it's mandatory: If the user didn't want the mails, they're going to mark your spam as spam and you'll have the deliverability problems that you deserve.
Totally agreed. Intent to opt in is what matters. If the box is pre-checked, it's opt-out. If it's hidden (in the ToS or elsewhere), it's opt-out.
Yes, that is the law here in the EU. You are not allowed to send me emails unless I took some positive action to subscribe. Rightly so.
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.
I hear this often, but I'm running my mailserver since 2005, since 2009 with a additional domain, have changed my IP at least one time. I had no issues with M$ or gmail at all.
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...
But if you look at the HTML on the official blog, it has the tag:
So... still a bit of a clown show (and maybe why it got submitted to HN with the wpcomstaging.com subdomain).> Why is this blog on a sudomain of wpcomstaging.com?
I find it ironic that they "acquired" Eleventy and are developing Build Awesome Pro [1], but can't bring themselves to dogfood it.
They do have an alpha version of Build Awesome Pro, right?
[1] https://blog.fontawesome.com/pausing-kickstarter/
Does anyone want these emails? Users getting them might just be marking them as spam because they're unwanted
>Right before we hit send on our announcement emails for our new Build Awesome Kickstarter campaign... This is spam.
Yes, so they collected emails from users of one product and are now spamming marketing emails about a fundraising campaign for a different product.
That's at least two steps removed from being merely questionable. I'm really struggling to understand how they imagined that this wouldn't end up being blocked.
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.
You are spam. It doesn't get any simpler than this.
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.
> 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?
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
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!
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
So basically Gmail was right and the system is working as intended?
Better link: https://blog.fontawesome.com/we-have-a-99-email-reputation-g...
Even this article is an ad. I have a hard time believing these people don't understand why their advertising gets marked as advertising.
And AI written
> We have a 99% email reputation (when you exclude 90% of our deliveries)
> 60% of the time, it works every time.
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.
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.
We didn't want too many fake accounts. We didn't ask for phone numbers. It's very easy to get a burner email, in case someone wanted to avoid giving the main email. Burner phone numbers are harder.
Also, an important use is password and username recovery. We even got password or username request 30 minutes after signup! They had quiz to solve if they want to help during studding and it's good to track them.
We had a lot of wrong emails, in particular it was common someone@yahoo.com instead of someone@yahoo.com.ar because Yahoo! offer both options. Also someone@gmail.com.ar that does not exist, but that never stop users.
(If it help, we never asked to confirm the email again after the registration.)
how do you prevent malicious use intentionally signing up someone else without verification? and how do you verify your own email if you are not technically competent enough to know how to spell your email correctly? (probably not an issue for students, but just seeing stories here on hackernews about people receiving emails not meant for them shows that this is an issue)
I guess whether that matters depends on the actual application. As long as it's not spamming (E-mail or phone), the impact of having an incorrect email address may be low.
If you used a username, you wouldn't have this problem. As it stands, signing up someone else's address for a lot of sites to spam them with confirmations is already an attack vector that's used in the wild. And that's legitimate spam and should be reported as spam and sites that do this are spam amplifiers.
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.
IIRC, we don't give an automatic email for students.
I'm in the first year of the University of Buenos Aires. Everyone with a high school title can get into the First Year, no filtration before the first year. There are more than 50.000 students per year. The fist years is shared between the 13 Faculty (branches?). Each one has a different policy about the email for students. Moreover, inside each faculty each department has a different policy about the email for students (IIRC ~20 years ago in computer science every student got an email, but in math you got an email only after getting a undergraduate-TA position in ~3rd year).
Now the whole University has a deal with Microsoft so I got an email there. And also the First Year has a deal with Google so I got another email. Each faculty may self host or has another(s) deals with someone else, so I have another email in my old faculty. Three in total. I may even ask nicely to get a email as visitor in other departments/faculties, but I'm too lazy to do that. And some coworkers work in two or more faculties so add a few more emails for them.
Back to students, I have no idea how many emails they get now. Also, they may get the email a few months after the semester began, or not, I'm not sure and in the best case we definitively can wait until all the paperwork is done.
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.
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.
And how should this approval look like? You think about a email that asks if you want to receive mail from buy-my-dickpicks-online-at-dp.com@dp.com?
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]!!
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 ?
> 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".
I have seen many cases of Google doing something wrong, but maybe people dont enjoy those emails and they are reporting them as spam?
Even with a dedicated IP, SendGrid has always had poor deliverability.
I switched to Postmark years ago and never looked back.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Seriously, almost no one uses RSS. Of course it's the best format for subscriptions, but the average person uses e-mail and understands e-mail.
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...
I regularly get spam/phishing emails slipping through the cracks.
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.
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.
> 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...
> 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...
The "peak" situation for someone in the US credit card system is a bunch of cards that have been open for years, no new cards, a single used credit card with a low balance relative to credit limit, and an instalment loan/mortgage.
But yeah, people need to put at least a dollar on one of their cards every month to maintain this.
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.
That's very generous of you to even give them that opportunity. I don't even read it to see if they're trying to be funny before I mark an unsolicited marketing email as spam.
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€
> 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.
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. 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.
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.
> 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
> use actual google tools to see actual reputation
Google has a v2 of the postmaster tools that are actually useful now? Awesome news! I totally missed that.
All v1 ever showed me as a small-time mail server admin was equivalent to "nothing to see here".
But v2 now actually shows me things like compliance status and user reported spam rate for my domains.
What's your spam report rate on Google Postmaster Tools?
Their reputation is probably so poor that GPT won't even show them.
How many people here check their spam?
I do frequently, but I honestly can't recall the last time a message i really wanted actually ended up there. I mostly end up hitting not-spam on marketing/updates that I've actually subscribed to
all the time, unfortunately. Mostly when I have to confirm the email address when I sign up to a website account, but every couple fo weeks, too.
Yea, me too. All the time.
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.
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.
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"
> 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...
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.
Kind of makes you wonder, just a little, about the quality of their email setup, too
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.
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.
TLDR: Spammer wonders why their spam sent through a spam service (SendGrid) isn't getting delivered.
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.
Seems to me that a very high percentage of people would set their agent policy to “I’m never interested in spam” and then the spammers would try to circumvent that and we’d be back where we are now except with everyone spending more computation.
If you did that then you are better off never being targeted by emails/messages by the company at all. It is in the benefit of the company to know that. Right now its a tedious unsubscribe process that requires me to keep doing it all the time and company that does not know just blasts everyone who signed up. Its a ridiculous thing to do.
This would require an inversion of dynamics based on quantification and collective realization of a couple of things:
0. Emails suffer from a "misclassification" of intent issue on a time*attention scale. Imagine time of the day/week/year on one axis and their attention on email inbox on the other. Emails have to arrive at the right (x,y) point for a user to act on. But they rarely do.
1. Well being of a user is proportional to their current state of mind to receive an message from X. Which is proportional to how likely they are to listen what you have to say.
Both of these suggest a negotiation of messages between two parties, much like when a bartender asks you if you want a refill and you can say yes/no.
for me the problem is as simple as not allowing a third party to classify what i consider spam. i do that on my own. and what i classify as spam has no bearing on anyone elses classification and vice versa.
most critically however, i would like my email client to track which email i used to subscribe somewhere. which emails are replies to emails i sent out. which senders i approve of or are in my contact list (or are addresses i set email to before). these should be overriding any global classification as spam. subscription emails should be classified as such and not as spam either.