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We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

blogfontawesome.wpcomstaging.com

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

#71

Post by amluto »

Youden wrote: post #7

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 pro…

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.

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

#72

Post by em-bee »

graypegg wrote: post #67

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.

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

#73

Post by em-bee »

xigoi wrote: post #70
gus_massa wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ema…

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.

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

#74

Post by deaux »

echelon wrote: post #59
itopaloglu83 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 t…

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.

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

#75

Post by itopaloglu83 »

echelon wrote: post #59
itopaloglu83 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 t…

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.

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

#76

Post by itopaloglu83 »

wildzzz wrote: post #69
itopaloglu83 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

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

#77

Post by direwolf20 »

Youden wrote: post #7

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 pro…

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.

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

#78

Post by cube00 »

kodebach wrote: post #24
Youden wrote: post #7

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 pro…

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…

> 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...

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

#79

Post by ryandrake »

gus_massa wrote: post #40
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 ema…

> 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.

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

#80

Post by igor47 »

daneel_w wrote: post #66
bar000n wrote: post #34

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…

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.
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