We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees • Hacker News Board

Re: We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

#31

Post by sva_ » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 2:27 PM UTC

the__alchemist wrote: post #8

#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.

Re: We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

#32

Post by meatmanek » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 2:28 PM UTC

Pikamander2 wrote: post #5

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.

Re: We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

#33

Post by layer8 » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 2:29 PM UTC

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

Re: We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

#34

Post by bar000n » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 2:31 PM UTC

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...

Re: We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

#35

Post by dwedge » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 2:31 PM UTC

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

Re: We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

#36

Post by layer8 » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 2:32 PM UTC

basilikum wrote: post #30

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...

Re: We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

#37

Post by dwedge » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 2:33 PM UTC

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

Re: We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

#38

Post by Brybry » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 2:34 PM UTC

0x3f wrote: post #14

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.

Re: We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

#39

Post by cs02rm0 » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

> 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.

Re: We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

#40

Post by gus_massa » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 2:37 PM UTC

apitman wrote: post #20

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.