Discussion

Font Awesome

j16sdiz: No. Thanks.Your "fun" email belongs to my spam box.

fontain: You are not penalized for sending infrequently but sending infrequently lessens the chance that your recipients will remember you and remember why they subscribed to your emails and if they don’t remember, they mark as spam.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.

mistrial9: an old quote .... ".. having mastered the game of five card stud in the Pacific theater, the victorious Allies declare the game of Poker to be illegal"

the__alchemist: #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?

Youden: 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 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.[0]: https://cdnjs.com/libraries/font-awesome

sho_hn: If I read this right, they used their email recipient list from Font Awesome to spam people with an unrelated new product announcement.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.

vachina: From a user’s PoV. Gmail is awesome. Super low noise and zero phishing emails.

powera: From March, also https://blog.fontawesome.com/we-have-a-99-email-reputation-g... is the canonical URL.

em-bee: that's the url i submitted, but HN changed it. no idea why.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.

0x3f: 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.

bakugo: Yes, it was. Recent Claudes absolutely love to spam an endless stream of very short sentences like this.

apitman: 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.

0x3f: Well you can already do this with email, can't you? You just use [company-name]@[yourdomain].com. Or you+[company]@gmail.com. Then you either block all unknown, or more practically just block companies as soon as they start spamming you.

rozumem: What's your spam report rate on Google Postmaster Tools?

stackghost: >It’s a genuine catch-22: send too many emails and your reputation drops from complaints. Send too few and it drops from inactivity. Try to do the right thing and you get penalized either way. And. It. Is. Frustrating.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.

SAI_Peregrinus: Opt-out is not consent. If I didn't opt in, I mark it as spam.

airstrike: [delayed]

dwedge: 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

basilikum: 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.

layer8: The official blog is here: https://blog.fontawesome.com/we-have-a-99-email-reputation-g...

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

bar000n: 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...

Brybry: 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.

itopaloglu83: I think most of them are spamming you and you’re being nice to attribute to mistakes.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.

0x3f: 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 and mark as spam when I see it.

jeffbee: Their reputation is probably so poor that GPT won't even show them.

quickthrowman: If I did not explicitly opt-in to receiving emails, which I never do, I mark them as spam in Gmail. Stop sending unsolicited emails and you won’t be reported for spam, it’s pretty easy.

fnord77: [delayed]

itopaloglu83: 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.

echelon: 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.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.

Pikamander2: 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.

meatmanek: 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.

jeffbee: There is a good reason for this. Part of Google maintains the principle that their own traffic has to go through the same classification process as all other mails. Other parts of Google can't stop themselves from sending spam from what are supposed to be gold-plated VIPs. Consequently, some of Google's own behaviors have poor reputation and some legitimate transactional messages are collateral damage.

lysace: > Other parts of Google can't stop themselves from sending spam from what are supposed to be gold-plated VIPs.Seems like a badly run company.(Insert that caricature of the MSFT org chart with guns pointing in all directions.)

em-bee: at that scale i don't believe it is possible to do much better on this particular issue at least.

prmoustache: Email subscriptions is and has always been the wrong way to go. If you want to provide a news subscription service, provide RSS. If you want to receive news about a particular service/company, subscribe to their RSS feeds. No reputations and delivery issue to handle for the provider, no subscriptions and unsubscriptions to manage for provider, can be managed locally by user. Providers have easy setup, users have full control. And RSS is supported by any half decent email client so people who like having stuff in the same interface do not have to use a different software.What's not to like?

em-bee: google marks my private emails that i send as replies to messages from gmail as spam.i don't send any unsolicited emails from my domain ever. i have nothing to sell. so no, it's not that easy.

gus_massa: 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.

xigoi: Why are you making the students use their personal e-mail rather than the school e-mail?

wildzzz: 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 leave on the critical stream.

fmx: GMail disagrees with you, because GMail users disagree with you. They are clicking "report spam" on your emails. Whether or not you think what you're sending is spam, the recipients think it is, and that's what matters. (Based on the other comments in this thread it's not hard to see why they might think so.)

graypegg: 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.

itopaloglu83: 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.

itopaloglu83: 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.

deaux: 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.

em-bee: so the only way to grow a business is to sell to people who tolerate spam and avoid those who don't?

echelon: They complain a lot less.This is why B2B is better than B2C.

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

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

exabrial: As much as I am thankful for the innovations Google has given us, we no longer prosecute monopolies where they are toxic unfortunately. The Federal government learned awhile back that it's much easier to manipulate one large company rather than a healthy ecosystem of small companies.

GroksBarnacles: No company has ever gained users by forcing emails on users.

arein3: Yeah I hate spam so much, hope everyone here reports them as spam to give them a lesson to not pretend to be the good guys when they are spammers.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.

cs02rm0: > 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.

aeturnum: 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 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?

choose to mark some of what we send as spam

ryandrake: Reading this article, all I saw was: Spam Spam Spam Spam:> we use SendGrid to deliver our emailsOh oh... here we go, the music is starting...> hit send on our announcement emails for our new Build Awesome Kickstarter campaignSpam.> 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 shareSpam.> our instinct is to only email folks when we actually have something fun to shareSpam.> A big release, something we’re excited about, news worth your time.Spam.> That’d probably be every couple of monthsSpam.> 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!