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

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

#151

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 6:37 PM UTC

itopaloglu83 wrote: post #41

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…

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.

[deleted]

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

#152

Post by ValentineC » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 6:53 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.

> Why is this blog on a sudomain of wpcomstaging.com?

I find it ironic that they "acquired" Eleventy and are developing Build Awesome Pro [1], but can't bring themselves to dogfood it.

They do have an alpha version of Build Awesome Pro, right?

[1] https://blog.fontawesome.com/pausing-kickstarter/

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

#153

Post by gus_massa » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 6:58 PM UTC

xigoi wrote: post #91

em-bee wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's probably the other way around. students use their private email, and they somehow can't make them use a school email.

Then make the system use the school e-mail automatically without asking them? That’s how it works at my faculty.

IIRC, we don't give an automatic email for students.

I'm in the first year of the University of Buenos Aires. Everyone with a high school title can get into the First Year, no filtration before the first year. There are more than 50.000 students per year. The fist years is shared between the 13 Faculty (branches?). Each one has a different policy about the email for students. Moreover, inside each faculty each department has a different policy about the email for students (IIRC ~20 years ago in computer science every student got an email, but in math you got an email only after getting a undergraduate-TA position in ~3rd year).

Now the whole University has a deal with Microsoft so I got an email there. And also the First Year has a deal with Google so I got another email. Each faculty may self host or has another(s) deals with someone else, so I have another email in my old faculty. Three in total. I may even ask nicely to get a email as visitor in other departments/faculties, but I'm too lazy to do that. And some coworkers work in two or more faculties so add a few more emails for them.

Back to students, I have no idea how many emails they get now. Also, they may get the email a few months after the semester began, or not, I'm not sure and in the best case we definitively can wait until all the paperwork is done.

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

#154

Post by ghm2199 » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 7:02 PM UTC

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.

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

#155

Post by ghm2199 » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 7:07 PM UTC

ghm2199 wrote: post #154

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 sen…

This would require an inversion of dynamics based on quantification and collective realization of a couple of things:

0. Emails suffer from a "misclassification" of intent issue on a time*attention scale. Imagine time of the day/week/year on one axis and their attention on email inbox on the other. Emails have to arrive at the right (x,y) point for a user to act on. But they rarely do.

1. Well being of a user is proportional to their current state of mind to receive an message from X. Which is proportional to how likely they are to listen what you have to say.

Both of these suggest a negotiation of messages between two parties, much like when a bartender asks you if you want a refill and you can say yes/no.

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

#156

Post by echelon » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 7:11 PM UTC

FireBeyond wrote: post #149

echelon wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Do you know how exceedingly hard it is to grow a business This reminds me of a local bricks and mortar small business that closed down and the wife posted a completely tone deaf: "It is a horrible shame that our long sought out dream had to die because the local "community" was not willing to support it." I missed the part where "community" meant we are obligated to expend our own resources for your profit. Doubly…

Small business is brutal, isn't it?

You're fighting small biz and accept the world big tech has created to extort all of us.

You'd yell at that local brick and mortar for sending you a half off coupon in your email because it's spam, but my guess is you're fine with perpetual smartphone upgrades and not owning the entire vertical taxation and lock-in stack.

We're allowing ourselves to become serfs of big business that would no sooner outsource or lay us off.

The puzzling moral superiority is what really gets me.

Just don't complain when your tech company lays you off or your job has been automated out of existence. You might have to learn what hustle and sales really are.

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

#157

Post by leni536 » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 7:13 PM UTC

bradleyankrom wrote: post #119

cube00 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>more and more companies are spamming my inbox despite disabling any promotional emails in their settings. The other trick I've noticed is companies will add new categories and default those on. I'll see a whole page of categories and somehow the last one will be enabled even though I'm sure I'd have turned them all off when I disabled the bulk of them.

LinkedIn does this and it is annoying

Linkedin sends you notifications an emails for having other unread notifications without any additional info. It's really the worst.

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

#158

Post by gus_massa » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 7:23 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #93

em-bee wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

on most services you sign up by using an email address (or a phone number) as an identifier. these need to be verified to make sure it's actually yours and not someone else's, or a typo.

They don't need to be verified through E-mail or through the phone, though. A simple landing page after you sign up that says: "We signed up [E-mail] for this service using [phone number]. If this is incorrect, [click here] to make corrections" would work, too. Frankly, I'm getting tired of having to constantly "verify" this and "confirm" that every time I sign up for or log into an online service. It's especially an…

We didn't want too many fake accounts. We didn't ask for phone numbers. It's very easy to get a burner email, in case someone wanted to avoid giving the main email. Burner phone numbers are harder.

Also, an important use is password and username recovery. We even got password or username request 30 minutes after signup! They had quiz to solve if they want to help during studding and it's good to track them.

We had a lot of wrong emails, in particular it was common someone@yahoo.com instead of someone@yahoo.com.ar because Yahoo! offer both options. Also someone@gmail.com.ar that does not exist, but that never stop users.

(If it help, we never asked to confirm the email again after the registration.)

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

#159

Post by rationalist » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 7:30 PM UTC

RHSeeger wrote: post #142

amluto wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't mind if a company sends me emails if I gave them my email address. As long as, when I click "unsubscribe" to the email, they stop. I don't want to have to go log back into their system and unsubscribe. I just want to click the unsubscribe button and have it be done - forever, not just until they add a new category for email. I have a fair number of companies that send me emails (because I signed up for their…

> log back into their system and unsubscribe

FYI, requiring logging in to unsubscribe is a violation of the CAN-SPAM Act in the U.S., I just mark those as spam if they don't allow one-click unsubscribes.

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

#160

Post by em-bee » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 7:31 PM UTC

ghm2199 wrote: post #154

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 sen…

for me the problem is as simple as not allowing a third party to classify what i consider spam. i do that on my own. and what i classify as spam has no bearing on anyone elses classification and vice versa.

most critically however, i would like my email client to track which email i used to subscribe somewhere. which emails are replies to emails i sent out. which senders i approve of or are in my contact list (or are addresses i set email to before). these should be overriding any global classification as spam. subscription emails should be classified as such and not as spam either.