The myth of the low complaint rate

I have been reading the complaints filed by Holomaxx and will have some analysis and information about them probably Monday or Tuesday next week. I’ve been keeping an eye on the press and something that Ken Magill said caught my eye.

Specifically, HolomaXx alleges, its Microsoft complaint rates have been consistently at or below 0.5 percent and its Yahoo complaint rates have been at or below 0.1 percent.
Spam-complaint rates are a significant metric ISPs use to determine if incoming email is wanted by recipients or not.

This is not exactly true. Sender who have mail blocked at the edge or filtered into the bulk folder have extremely low complaint rates.
I’ll say it again, because it is critically important to understand.
Bad senders who do not get email to the inbox have very low complaint rates.
Why? ISPs measure complaints as a percentage of the emails that make it to the inbox. If mail is not hitting the inbox then the complaint rates are zero.
I understand this is a bit of a catch 22, in that to get a good reputation you need to get mail to the inbox and to get mail to the inbox you need a good reputation. But I hear a lot of spammers tell me they absolutely can’t be sending spam because their complaint rates are so low and it’s just not true.

Related Posts

Should you respond to complaints

David Spinks asks on twitter:

Should you ever contact someone who made an abuse complaint about your newsletter to find out why

Read More

Ah, Spammers.

The too many.
The stupid.
The spammers.
The blog spammers are still actively attempting to get their claws into my blog. Today the comments included:

Read More

More information on arrests

Terry Zink has a more detailed post on some of the spammer arrests and takedowns that have happened recently.
In addition to the events I mentioned yesterday, authorities arrested an Armenian man suspected of running the Bredolab botnet. Unfortunately, the arrest has not stopped the spam with the malware payload.
These are issues that many ISP abuse and postmaster desks deal with on a daily basis. Their filtering schemes and policies are in place to protect customers from the mob, and criminals. I don’t think enough marketers and senders understand exactly how much the ISPs are dealing with and why many ISPs don’t really care that “mail is taking 12 hours to get to the inbox.” They are dealing with much more important things.

Read More