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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