Complaint rate / spam rate
Share of people who hit “Report spam” — Gmail and Yahoo watch this closely (often stay under 0.3%).
Say it out loud
“The share of people who press Report spam. Three in a thousand is the line, and crossing it is what puts us in the spam folder.”
User-reported spam is the core reputation signal at every major provider, and it is measured per provider, not averaged across your programme. Google's bulk guidelines treat 0.30% as a line not to reach and ask senders to stay near 0.10%. It moves with list quality and send frequency, and not at all with how good the design is.
- 0.30%
- the line you must not reach
- Google, Email sender guidelines
- 0.10%
- where Google asks you to sit
- Google, Email sender guidelines
- 310 of 94,000
- 0.10% — Google asks you to sit here
- 0.30% — the line you must not reach
The whole playing field is half of one percent wide. Both marks are Google's own; the position of the marker is an example.
Over Google's 0.30% line. Filtering starts, and it applies to everything you send afterwards.
Three hundred and ten people out of
ninety-four thousand. That is the whole margin.
This is why one badly-targeted send to a re-engagement segment can cost a quarter of recovery.
Yours
Nobody does this for you.
Where you find it
- Google Postmaster Tools → Spam Rate
- Microsoft SNDS → complaint data per IP
What goes wrong
Averaging across providers. Gmail measures your Gmail rate. Sitting at a comfortable 0.12% overall while Gmail alone is at 0.4% is identical, from Gmail's point of view, to sitting at 0.4%.
What people get told
The claim. “People who complain would have unsubscribed anyway, so it is the same thing.”
Actually. It is not remotely the same. An unsubscribe removes one person. A complaint is a negative reputation event that affects delivery of every subsequent message to every other recipient at that provider. Making unsubscribe easy is how you convert the second into the first.
The dated rules behind this
A definition is not a citation. These are the pages with the primary source, the date it was published, and what to do about it.
- Gmail enforces authentication, PTR, TLS and a 0.30 percent spam rateGlobal · Gmail
- Yahoo requires authentication and a spam rate below 0.3 percentGlobal · Yahoo
- Google Postmaster Tools retired the reputation dashboardsGlobal · Gmail
- Complaint feedback loops are provider-specific — Gmail is not Yahoo CFLGlobal
See also
Where this sits
Stop 7, a human reacts. Somebody opens, clicks, ignores, unsubscribes, or presses the button that costs you the most.