Are Complaints Weighted?

I’ve been doing a lot of my question answering over on the Email Geeks slack and have decided to bring some of the answers over here. Today’s question:

My ESP provides a dashboard of spam complaints. How should I be looking at the data? Are some complaints more important than others?

The spam complaint dashboard is a record of the feed back loop messages (FBLs) that an ESP has received about a message. Those messages are sent by the ISP when the recipient marks the message as spam in the user interface of that provider.

Complaints should be viewed as a percentage of the messages that were delivered to the inbox at that provider. So if you send 50,000 emails in total and 1000 go to libero.it, and you get 5 complaints from libero.it, then your complaint rate is 0.5% not 0.01%, assuming 100% inbox delivery.

Complaints are a part of the filtering and reputation system used by the recipient ISP to filter mail and determine how future mail will be delivered. The ISPs only care about complaints for the mail they see, they don’t care about complaints from any other provider.

You should have almost zero gmail.com complaints, because gmail doesn’t send complaints back to anyone. Sometimes you will occasionally see gmail.com complaints from Yahoo when mail is forwarded due to the ways Yahoo manages their complaint feedback loop. The only complaint data Gmail provides is the percentage of complaints and, sometimes, a identifier string in the Google Postmaster Tool interface.

ESPs use complaints to determine if their customers are violating their AUP and if they need to have action taken against them. In that respect, the “weighting” depends on the different policies of the ESPs (and they’re often not public).

It’s generally accepted that complaint rates over 0.3% are bad and that complaint rates below 0.1% are acceptable.

A couple things to note about complaints:

  • Not all ISPs provide feedback loop emails to senders including some of the major broadband providers outside the US, Apple Mail and Gmail.
  • FBLs are solely for mail to consumer domains. Microsoft has a full FBL infrastructure built into O365 and their consumer but only send FBLs for mail to their consumer domains.
  • Not all “this is spam” buttons are tied to a FBL. Apple mail users, for instance, have a “junk” button but it only affects filters for that user and does not trigger a FBL complaint to go back to the ESP.
  • Not all ESPs pay Validity the exorbitant amount they’re charging for FBL feeds.
  • Complaint rates as viewed by the ISPs are different than the complaint rates as viewed by the ESPs. ISPs will always have a more accurate view of complaints.
  • Users are not permitted to report mail in the bulk folder, so a lack of reports for senders may mean there are already delivery problems.
  • Complaints are very noisy for small senders as users can sometimes report spam by mistake or incorrectly use the spam button instead of delete or trash.

Overall, complaints are a great way to monitor what your recipients think about the email you’re sending them. For ESPs and compliance desks they’re a good way to monitor which customers may have issues that need to be addressed before their mail is spam foldered or blocked at the ISPs.

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August 2014: The Month in Email

Isn’t August the month where things are supposed to slow down? We’re still waiting for that to happen around here… it’s been great to be busy, but we’re hoping to continue to carve out more time for blogging as we move into the fall.
August
As usual, we reported on a mix of industry trends and news, the persistence of spam, and did a deep dive into an interesting technical topic. Let’s start there: Steve wrote a post explaining Asynchronous Bounces (yes, it’s a GNFAB), with some examples of how they’re used and how they can cause operational problems.
In industry news, we did a roundup post of some Gmail changes and a followup post on security issues with non-Latin characters in addresses. We also celebrated the long-awaited release of a wonderful resource from MAAWG that I am very proud to have helped author, the white paper Help! I’m on a Blocklist! (PDF link). We receive dozens of these calls every week, and though we are always happy to help people solve urgent delivery crises, we spend most of our consulting time and attention working with people to build sustainable email programs, so this document is a great “self-service” resource for people looking to troubleshoot blocklist issues on their own.
In other industry and MAAWG-related news, we noted that the nomination period for the J.D. Falk award has opened (you have just a few more days, procrastinators) and took a moment to reminisce about our friend J.D. and his incredible contributions to the field.
On the topic of creating, sending, and reading more attractive email, we posted some  resources from Mailchimp and crowdsourcing templates from Send With Us. We also incorrectly reported on a not-actually-new interface from AOL, Alto. Interesting to note that there’s been so little followup from AOL (and almost no post-launch coverage) in the two years since launch.
We also touched on a few myths: email saves trees and low complaint volume is good.
And finally, in November of 2013, I unsubscribed from every possible email I received on a specific account. I followed up on that briefly in a Part 2 post, and this month went back and wrote a Part 3 followup. Spoiler alert: spam is still a problem. Of course, we got some comments that we were probably doing it wrong, so Unsubscribe Barbie showed up to add her thoughts. We try not to be snarky around here, but sometimes we just don’t try very hard.

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I'm not a customer any more

We recently moved co-working spaces, after 8 or 9 years in the same place.  I’ll be up front here, we left Space A because I was annoyed with them. I’ve been increasingly unhappy with them for a while, but moving is a pain so just put up with them. But their most recent rent increase along with the lost packages, increasing deposit requirements and revolving door of incompetent staff finally drove us to find a new co-working space.
On the 15th of the last month of our contract, I started receiving marketing emails from Space A. I just deleted a couple of them but finally decided I didn’t want to ever see their name again. I tried to unsubscribe.

Gotta give them credit. Checkboxes for everything, except some of them are to opt-in and some of them are to opt-out. This is the kind of interface marketers use to confuse folks and limit the actual number of opt-outs. I’ll admit, the first time I tried to opt-out, I probably did it wrong. But, I know CAN SPAM says they have 10 days, and I know many marketers take advantage of that so I wait a while and keep deleting the messages that show up in my mailbox.
That was late June. By early July I realize it’s been more than 10 days and I’m still getting mail from them. So I click another opt-out link. This time I notice I need to uncheck most boxes, but check the bottom one. OK, fine, you got me, I didn’t read and didn’t correctly opt-out the first time. This time I will.
I continue to receive email. I continue to delete the email. We run our own mail system so I don’t have the benefit of a this-is-spam button, but you can bet if I did I would have used it, on every message I received after my first attempt to opt-out.
This week, after getting yet more mail, I start digging. What ESP are they using that’s bungling the opt-out process? Ah. I know that ESP. So I send in a complaint to abuse@ESP asking them to please make their customer stop mailing me. I also go, once again, to the preference page and submit an opt-out request. Because, hey, maybe third time is a charm?
12 hours later I get yet another mail from them. Really? REALLY? OK. Now I’m moving from annoyed to irate. First step: figure out if I know anyone working at said ESP. Ah, right, them. I have a lot of respect for this colleague, so I send a heads up pointing out that their customer isn’t honoring unsubscribes and can they take a look at what might have broken in their unsubscribe process.
This morning they tell me they looked into my subscription and have not registered any opt-out request until the one this week. The other two? Not recorded in their system. “Does this match your recollection of what happened?” No. No it doesn’t. I know I clicked on unsub links at least 3 times and only one of those clicks is recorded.
At this point, I’m pretty sure I’ll be suppressed by the ESP so I won’t have to get mail from Space A any longer. That fixes the annoyance on my end. But I can’t help thinking about how horrible this interaction was, both from a deliverability perspective and from a customer perspective.

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Improving Gmail Delivery

Lately I’m hearing a lot of people talk about delivery problems at Gmail. I’ve written quite a bit about Gmail (Another way Gmail is different, Gmail filtering in a nutshell, Poor delivery at Gmail but no where else, Insight into Gmail filtering) over the last year and a half or so. But those articles all focus on different parts of Gmail delivery and it’s probably time for a summary type post.

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