InformationBodyThis article explains the basics of spam complaints and their impact. In This Article What Are Spam Complaints? How Spam Complaints Are Made What Happens When We Receive Complaints Preventing Spam Complaints Additional Resources What Are Spam Complaints? Spam complaints are reports made by email recipients against emails they don't want in their inbox. It's impossible to completely avoid spam complaints - even legitimate senders can get them, so a small number is not necessarily cause for alarm. If one of your campaigns receives an excessive number of complaints, your next mailing could be blocked by inbox providers. When this happens, even people who do want to hear from you may not receive your mailing. As a result, it's important to understand how spam complaints work and best practices for avoiding them. How Spam Complaints Are Made Most inbox providers include a prominent "This is spam" button in the inbox to allow people to report unwanted emails. Here's an example "spam" button in a Gmail account: People click on the spam button for various reasons. It may be that they're confused about who you are or why you're emailing them; sometimes it's because they can't find the unsubscribe link, or even just because they're having a really bad day. What Happens When We Receive Complaints As an email service provider, we have a "feedback loop" with all of the major inbox providers. When a recipient marks an email as spam, their inbox provider notifies us through the feedback loop. We also monitor complaints made by Gmail customers, but Gmail's feedback loop works a little differently. ⒾInfoRecipients who report your email as spam are immediately unsubscribed from your audience. Every complaint received is recorded in our system and we regularly calculate the percentage of complaints generated by each email. Higher-Than-Normal Spam Complaints If you send an email that receives more than a 0.02% complaint rate, we will notify you with a warning email that includes advice to help you address the situation. We understand that even legitimate senders get complaints so, provided that you're doing the right thing, getting a warning email from us shouldn't be cause for panic. When a sender receives high complaint rates, it also damages Emma's sender reputation and relationships with inbox providers, which in turn, negatively impacts all of our customers. So if we do get in touch with you because of high complaint rates, rest assured we're making contact to help you investigate the problem and hopefully solve it. We care about the sender reputation and deliverability of everyone who sends from Emma, so our Compliance team will reach out before the situation becomes dire to try to help you course correct. ✎NoteExcessively high complaint rates or repeated complaints may result in account suspension in order to prevent your sender reputation from further damage. When this happens, our Compliance team will work with you to help you get back on track. Preventing Spam Complaints To help prevent your emails from being marked as spam, you'll want to follow the best practices outlined in our Support Hub articles, including the following tips. Always send from a domain that you own and be sure to set up DMARC and DKIM authentication, at minimum.Always maintain a permission-based audience. Never buy, rent, or borrow subscriber lists, as these are not permission-based and can contain spam traps.Use a confirmed opt-in list to stop fake signups, bots, and spelling errors from sending your emails where they're not wanted.Add reCaptcha to all of your signup forms to help prevent bot signups.Make sure your sender name and email address mention the business or brand that the email is coming from.Keep content relevant by using personalization and dynamic content.Let your contacts know how often you'll be sending.Don't overwhelm your contacts with too many emails.Don't send so few emails that contacts don't remember signing up. Additional Resources 9 Things That Can Hurt Your Email DeliverabilityAllowlisting Emma's AddressesCommon Reasons Why Emails Are BlockedDeliverability: Best Practices for New SendersDeliverability: OverviewDeliverability HubDKIM and DeliverabilityEmail Authentication: OverviewTitleSpam Complaints: OverviewURL NameHow-spam-complaints-work