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We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

em-bee

Comments (269)

  • Youden
    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
  • jherskovic
    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.
  • 0x3f
    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.
  • cs02rm0
    > 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.
  • sho_hn
    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.
  • bar000n
    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...
  • fmx
    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.)
  • airstrike
    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
  • the__alchemist
    #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?
  • chmod775
    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.
  • jjulius
    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.
  • oliwarner
    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.
  • eloisant
    > 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...
  • avaer
    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?
  • Pikamander2
    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.
  • graypegg
    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.
  • NelsonMinar
    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.
  • basilikum
    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.
  • SAI_Peregrinus
    Opt-out is not consent. If I didn't opt in, I mark it as spam.
  • PUSH_AX
    > 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?
  • rokkamokka
    Does anyone want these emails? Users getting them might just be marking them as spam because they're unwanted
  • antiloper
    >Right before we hit send on our announcement emails for our new Build Awesome Kickstarter campaign... This is spam.
  • Jean-Papoulos
    You are spam. It doesn't get any simpler than this.
  • proton_9
    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
  • avian
    > 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".
  • Scaled
    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.
  • danpalmer
    > We have a 99% email reputation (when you exclude 90% of our deliveries)> 60% of the time, it works every time.
  • xzjis
    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.
  • reenorap
    So basically Gmail was right and the system is working as intended?
  • gwbas1c
    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.
  • dwedge
    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
  • nkrisc
    The number of emails I expect from icons is zero.
  • layer8
  • alprado50
    I have seen many cases of Google doing something wrong, but maybe people dont enjoy those emails and they are reporting them as spam?
  • ryandrake
    Reading this article, all I saw was: Spam Spam Spam Spam:> we use SendGrid to deliver our emailsOh oh... here we go, the music is starting...> hit send on our announcement emails for our new Build Awesome Kickstarter campaignSpam.> 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 shareSpam.> our instinct is to only email folks when we actually have something fun to shareSpam.> A big release, something we’re excited about, news worth your time.Spam.> That’d probably be every couple of monthsSpam.> 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!
  • duskdozer
    Even this article is an ad. I have a hard time believing these people don't understand why their advertising gets marked as advertising.
  • apitman
    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.
  • boomboomsubban
    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.
  • t312227
    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€
  • MichaelAP
    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.
  • crowcroft
    Sounds more like Sendgrid didn’t get the memo and their email reputation metric is a poor proxy.
  • snowwrestler
    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.
  • prmoustache
    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?
  • vachina
    From a user’s PoV. Gmail is awesome. Super low noise and zero phishing emails.
  • rubinlinux
    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.
  • PunchyHamster
    > 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 prizeuse actual google tools to see actual reputation https://postmaster.google.com/v2/sender_complianceYou can also add some headers to get per-campaign spam reputation and any issues
  • jpalomaki
    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.
  • j16sdiz
    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.
  • the__alchemist
    If you want to send me unsolicited marketing email and not go to spam, be funny. Otherwise I will mark it as spam.
  • winstonwinston
    > 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.
  • quickthrowman
    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.
  • exiguus
    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.
  • anon
    undefined
  • rozumem
    What's your spam report rate on Google Postmaster Tools?
  • chistev
    How many people here check their spam?
  • exabrial
    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.
  • dmitrygr
    > 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...
  • fontain
    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.
  • wilg
    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.
  • nathias
    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...
  • powera
  • anon
    undefined
  • jeffbee
    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.
  • sylware
    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.
  • dwedge
    Oh man another spammer complaining about spam filters. You are the reason email sucks, the rest of us can complain about you
  • stackghost
    >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.
  • guywithahat
    > 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.
  • einpoklum
    People should really stop using GMail. Both for privacy reasons (Google is notorious on mining your email for targeted ads and for sharing data with the US government), and for anti-oligarchy/anti-trust reasons - that company controls much too muh of the activity on the Internet.There are perfectly fine email providers - free + donations, for-small-fee, at-the-ISP, etc.
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  • SoftTalker
    TLDR: Spammer wonders why their spam sent through a spam service (SendGrid) isn't getting delivered.
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  • Wowfunhappy
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  • ghm2199
    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.