Chances are the e-mails they've been sending so far went unread/got moved to spam by a lot of users and Gmail took that as a signal.
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.
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.
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.
> Some days it'll mark legitimate transaction emails from major companies as spam
I get legitimate transactional emails intended for someone else and those senders refuse to stop them because I'm not their customer and only their customer can request account updates. Those get marked as spam.
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.
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.
So many of these "freemium" things will spam you relentlessly asking you to upgrade.
This one doesn't have the best history either, although it's officially open source, at least at one point the build system was private[0]. I've not kept up with the drama, so I have no idea if that is still the case.
I no longer even unsubscribe when I get an unsolicited email. I intentionally stay subscribed but mark everything as spam. My hope is if people start doing this there will be more and more instances like this post, which is a good thing. Stop emailing me. Stop opting me in. And stop pretending like you're doing it for my benefit.
#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?
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.
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.
From your PoV maybe. I would be restless knowing that I may be silently losing important emails because they triggered some blackbox filter in such a way that they didn't even end up in my spam box...
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.
>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.
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
And for the spammers: What matters for this is whether the recipient thought they opted in. No matter how clever you think you are by pre-checking that checkbox, or hiding it in the TOS, or putting the non-mandatory spam checkbox between two other clearly-mandatory checkboxes so people think it's mandatory: If the user didn't want the mails, they're going to mark your spam as spam and you'll have the deliverability problems that you deserve.
Howdy y’all! Eleventy maintainer and member of Font Awesome here. Just saw this (I don’t regularly read HN).
Looks like someone shared the staging URL for the old FA WordPress blog on HN? I’ve updated the WordPress staging site to redirect to the new Build Awesome/Eleventy version at blog.fontawesome.com so that it doesn’t happen again. Sorry about that! You can read about the 2025 dogfood migration here: https://blog.fontawesome.com/blog-awesome-to-11ty/
the staging url wasn't shared, but the published page references the staging url as the canonical url so HN automatically updated the submitted url to that. that reference is what you need to fix.
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...
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
> 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 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?
> 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.
This is a simple case of "we" and "you" having different points of view. Sure, "we" think we have something fun to share, big news, we haven't emailed in a couple of months so users are probably anxious to hear from us. "You," the user, is getting 20 emails a day from people who think they are sharing something fun, only emailing every couple of months. They're flagging all that as spam, and that's why Gmail won't send your spam anymore.
That is the thing. If I sign up to a fonts website, I may be interested in fonts. Finding new fonts, the history of fonts, obscure lineages, how to use them, that stuff.
Give me that in a newsletter and I might read it. Give me some info about an "awesome" new "release" and lose me. That release is important for everybody working there, but outside of that it id irrelevant as a story.
Wanna sell a new industrial font? Write about interesting industrial fonts and then in the end tie it to yours. People that read that far may just click and buy.
Does "report not spam" do anything? A local business will send me a receipt from a gmail address, and every time it's marked as spam despite it telling me future mail from this address will not be tagged as spam.
Yes, so they collected emails from users of one product and are now spamming marketing emails about a fundraising campaign for a different product.
That's at least two steps removed from being merely questionable. I'm really struggling to understand how they imagined that this wouldn't end up being blocked.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 96.3 ms ] threadI 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.
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 legitimate transactional emails intended for someone else and those senders refuse to stop them because I'm not their customer and only their customer can request account updates. Those get marked as spam.
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.
[0]: https://cdnjs.com/libraries/font-awesome
This one doesn't have the best history either, although it's officially open source, at least at one point the build system was private[0]. I've not kept up with the drama, so I have no idea if that is still the case.
[0] https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/issues/12199#iss...
True, but all the information about non-kit deployments is available lower on the page.
#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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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/
Looks like someone shared the staging URL for the old FA WordPress blog on HN? I’ve updated the WordPress staging site to redirect to the new Build Awesome/Eleventy version at blog.fontawesome.com so that it doesn’t happen again. Sorry about that! You can read about the 2025 dogfood migration here: https://blog.fontawesome.com/blog-awesome-to-11ty/
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.
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?
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.
Give me that in a newsletter and I might read it. Give me some info about an "awesome" new "release" and lose me. That release is important for everybody working there, but outside of that it id irrelevant as a story.
Wanna sell a new industrial font? Write about interesting industrial fonts and then in the end tie it to yours. People that read that far may just click and buy.
That's at least two steps removed from being merely questionable. I'm really struggling to understand how they imagined that this wouldn't end up being blocked.