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

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

#261

Post by EGreg » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 12:26 PM UTC

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #189

EGreg wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have done the opposite We had a million people enter their email over the last decade We haven’t messaged a single one. 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.

So you’re retrospectively assuming consent? Gross.

No, the consent was given, recorded, and never acted upon. It had no expiration date. Many of those people are still using the app today.

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

#262

Post by EGreg » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 12:29 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #240

gpvos wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't do that, it will be disastrous for you. 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.

At least with your suggestions there's some chance that their newsletter won't instantly get flagged as spam. I'd do what you suggest, but send the newsletter from an separate domain once subscriptions have been confirmed.

That one-time announcement is called an email. And therefore that first announcement itself can be flagged as spam.

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.

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

#263

Post by EGreg » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 12:31 PM UTC

kolektiv wrote: post #235

EGreg wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have done the opposite We had a million people enter their email over the last decade We haven’t messaged a single one. 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.

> over the last decade 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…

People originally opted in and provided it expecting to get a newsletter on how to use the app. We never seemed to have the bandwidth to create a good enough one, so we never sent it. We kept improving the app until it became very good and still never sent the emails. But retained the addresses, so that one day we could tell people the app has improved, to give it a try, include animated GIFs of it in action and gradually educate them on ways to use it. For that I get chastizement on HN, figures.

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.

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

#264

Post by inetknght » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 12:53 PM UTC

withinboredom wrote: post #257

ferngodfather wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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.

When I worked on a notification system that sent over a billion messages a month. We received spam complaints on emails sent 6+ years ago. No correlation, just a one-off spam complaint. I always wondered why this was happening.

Probably because people like me finally had some time to go through an inbox with 20,000 unread messages. Almost anything that's been unread was either (most likely spam) or (very rarely) just simply unimportant.

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

#265

Post by IshKebab » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 12:59 PM UTC

0x3f wrote: post #43

Brybry wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Each email has an unsubscribe link, but my problem is that I don't know if these separate senders represent different email lists. In the past, some companies who've used this pattern have accepted my unsubscribe request on one list, but kept emailing me from another, as if I'm supposed to work out their marketing email list hierarchy in order to stop them spamming me. So these days I don't bother, I just select all…

Oh you want to unsubscribe? Sure, we've unsubscribed you from "Summer special 2025 marketing list", bye!

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

#266

Post by bombcar » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 1:08 PM UTC

jherskovic wrote: post #201

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.…

People who are such fans that they want to know will find out - I refresh https://toolguyd.com/ multiple times a week because I do want to know what crazy shit Ryobi and others are up to. But I’m rare.

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

#267

Post by eloisant » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 1:08 PM UTC

> 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...

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

#268

Post by ectospheno » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 1:11 PM UTC

cube00 wrote: post #78

kodebach wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.twil…

That is standard practice because you will need to cycle that marketing domain until the end of time as its email reputation sinks into the abyss. Because people don’t want spam.

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

#269

Post by drob518 » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 1:17 PM UTC

Maxion wrote: post #213

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but that it can take up to 10 days to stop receiving emails when you unsubscribe 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

I still do not understand how marketers haven't understood that quality > quantity.

But often $ generated by quantity > $ generated by quality. And that’s the metric everyone really cares about.

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

#270

Post by another-dave » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 1:20 PM UTC

aeturnum wrote: post #94

cs02rm0 wrote: post #39

> 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.

Zero emails is not low noise - it's zero noise. I agree that I sometimes want zero noise from companies whose products I am using...and also it depends on what is in the noise? Sometimes I find unexpected signal. 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 p…

> 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.