Essential spectrum and Feller type properties

We give necessary and sufficient conditions for a regular semi-Dirichlet form to enjoy a new Feller type property, which we call \emph{weak Feller property}. Our characterization involves potential theoretic as well as probabilistic aspects and seems to be new even in the symmetric case. As a consequence, in the symmetric case, we obtain a new variant of a decomposition principle of the essential spectrum for (the self-adjoint operators induced by) regular symmetric Dirichlet forms and a Persson type theorem, which applies e.g. to Cheeger forms on $\mathsf{RCD^*}$ spaces.