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.
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.
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.
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.
But the thing that might actually be killing their reputation is that their mails seemingly come from different emails all looking like bounces+18741050-ecba-jopudmulwqqsumjwub=nespj.com@email.fontawesome.com. 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.
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.
#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?
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.
Your "fun" email belongs to my spam box.
I use font awesome for a few quick icons. I have no interested in using a new site engine.
If you are getting new icons - great. not that interesting, but this is not spam.
If you are doing a incompatible update - i hate this. but i need to know this. thanks for telling me.
Doing a new kickstarter project? - no. hell no. this is not what i signed up for.
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.
Misconfigured website.
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.
Catchy subject seemingly target to me. Same for content.
But you are right, it's more likely enough users marked them as spam that Google algorithm decided the source is the spam.
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.
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.
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.
But an e-mail every 2 months seems innocuous until you factor in how many senders one normally has, which really means lots of "exciting news"... that are actually only really exciting for the people who sent them.
In an ideal world, I'd receive zero of those. I can just find out about things organically.
I don't think I've ever wished to receive a single e-mail about icons—or from any library I use, tbh
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.
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...
Of course you have an A+ reputation, the service assumes people want to receive your crap
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.
chmod775•58m ago
I send nothing but password-reset mails and never had an issue getting anything delivered, even though people constantly whine that delivering e-mail yourself has gotten so hard nowadays.
Just got a clean IP and don't send crap.