The industry standard for spam complaints is .01%; that’s about one complaint for every 10,000 recipients. Our system automatically detects higher-than-normal spam complaints through a process known as a feedback loop (FBL), which we have set up with all of the major inbox providers. Feedback loop notifications from Gmail work a little differently than those from other inbox providers. In case we ever need to contact you due to spam complaints made by Gmail customers against your emails, it’s important to know how their process works.

How Gmail’s feedback loop works

Gmail’s FBL process differs from other inbox providers’ FBLs in a few key ways:

1. The notifications that Gmail sends us only contain percentages. For example, 0.3% instead of 3 out of 1,000.
2. Gmail’s percentage is based on emails that reach the inbox, not the total number of emails sent.
3. Gmail users who mark an email as spam are not unsubscribed from your audience; any future emails sent to those contacts will just go straight to junk mail.

There is no way to identify which contacts marked an email as spam.

When the spam complaint percentage for a sender exceeds .3%, their reputation with Gmail has been badly affected. As a result, they will see some or all of the following:

• Their emails are far more likely to be blocked by spam filters, so that even their most engaged contacts may not receive their messages.
• With more of their emails going straight to the junk folder, their open rates will decrease even more. This will further damaging their sender reputation with Gmail and impact deliverability across all inbox providers.
• Gmail may begin rejecting their emails outright, causing their number of hard bounces to drastically increase.

How we handle Gmail complaints

When a sender receives high complaint rates, it also damages our sender reputation and relationships with inbox providers, which in turn, negatively impacts all of our customers. Because of this, we maintain a strong relationship with Gmail’s postmaster. If an account is showing up on Gmail’s radar, they will notify us so that we can take action.

After Gmail notifies us, we will email the primary contact on the account within 24 hours to let them know and help them get back on track.

We have many channels through which we receive complaint notifications. We don’t rely solely on Gmail’s postmaster or any other single source for this information and it’s unlikely that you could reach a 0.3% complaint rate with Gmail without triggering other alarms too. We care about the sender reputation and deliverability of everyone who sends from our system, so we will reach out before the situation becomes dire to try to help you course correct.

Repairing your sender reputation with Gmail

The FBL notifications that we receive from Gmail help us determine whether there are problems with a specific mailing, content, or groups, or if there’s a problem with the sender’s program overall. This means, provided you are doing the right thing, we can help identify where delivery problems lie and assist with repairing your sender reputation at Gmail so that future mailings are delivered successfully to inboxes again.

The repair process will likely involve reviewing your signup methods to see if they are causing complaints. To prevent further complaints, you’ll also need to refrain from sending to contacts with Gmail addresses for a period of 7-14 days, or for the next three mailing sends. We’ll also advise and assist you with segmenting your most engaged contacts so you can focus on sending to them to help boost sender reputation scores.