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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I only care about what I see.
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.
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.
I'd do what you suggest, but send the newsletter from an separate domain once subscriptions have been confirmed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
- 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)
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
Honda doesn’t let you find where your car is (which is a paid service) unless you share your precise location with them.
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.
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.
This, right here, is the solution.
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.
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).
You're all angry at the wrong people.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
The onus for clearly communicating that you are going to mail me anything other than transaction updates is with the sender, not the receiver.
Your dreams of business success aren’t my problem, and neither is your shamelessness.
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.
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.
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.
No thanks. I reject this as the abusive practice and mentality that it is.
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.
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.
I never consent to advertising. If I receive an advertisement, that means it was forced on me. Which I consider 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.
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.
Unless I asked for it, it is both unethical and will turn me as potential customer away, and it is illegal (GDPR).
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.
Now, explain to me why I am somehow obligated to support their business?
> 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.
If that’s really what you’re doing, show the open/click rates well above 80%.
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.
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.
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...
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...
True, but all the information about non-kit deployments is available lower on the page.
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.
“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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Mark it as such.
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.
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.
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.
I've noticed a recent trend where unsubscribing actually does nothing
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.
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.
Low noise for some fonts is zero emails. In the nicest way possible, users aren't excited about your big release, they're just not.
If 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.
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.
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?
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 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 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...
well, now we're stuck with gmail for a year, and no, it haven't improved anything!
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)
• 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.
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!
That's what email filters are supposed to be for. They aren't "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).
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?
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.
that is the idea of the Gmail business. it's not complicated.
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.
I check my spam folder regularly and it has been this way for as far as I can remember.
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
#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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
If this is their global approach to communication, perhaps Google is right.
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?
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.
Seems like a badly run company.
(Insert that caricature of the MSFT org chart with guns pointing in all directions.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
<link rel="canonical" href="https://blogfontawesome.wpcomstaging.com/we-have-a-99-email-reputation-gmail-disagrees/">
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?
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.
Good?
I switched to Postmark years ago and never looked back.
> 60% of the time, it works every time.
> 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!
Of course you have an A+ reputation, the service assumes people want to receive your crap
The article provides zero evidence for this claim except "our low-volume (by their own measure) marketing campaign gets marked as spam by gmail".
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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]!!
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.
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.
What's not to like?
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 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€
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.
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.
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
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.
Your reputation depends on THAT. Other metrics you think matter, they do not.
i don't send any unsolicited emails from my domain ever. i have nothing to sell. so no, it's not that easy.
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.
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...
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.
Misconfigured website.
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.
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.
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.
There are perfectly fine email providers - free + donations, for-small-fee, at-the-ISP, etc.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.