emailrules.today
Stop 7 of 8Week oneMinutes to days

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
To scaleYour Gmail spam rate against Google's published lines
0.33%
0.10%
0.30%
  • 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.

The arithmeticHow small the number actually isExample numbersscrolls →
Delivered to Gmail 94,000
Pressed "Report spam" 310
Spam rate 0.33%

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.

Target 0.10% (94 people)

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.

See also

Where this sits

Stop 7, a human reacts. Somebody opens, clicks, ignores, unsubscribes, or presses the button that costs you the most.

← BeforeApple MPPNext →Opt-out

FAQ

Awkward questions

Who is this actually for?

People who ship email and are too busy to re-read every PDF: week-one marketers, lifecycle/CRM, deliverability, multi-country ops, DTC brands, agencies — on Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Braze, HubSpot, SFMC, or something else. Pick your tool and geos so product-specific pages only appear when they match. EU and UK are first-class filters. Not for people who sell tools about email and need a fake score to demo.

Why only ~40 rules? Isn’t that… thin?

On purpose. A wall of 400 undated “best practices” is how you look busy and still get burned. Every page needs a primary source we actually read. Thin and checkable beats fat and folklore. Europe, bulk inbox rules, measurement honesty, and protocol topics like BIMI/DMARC policy are on the shelf when we can cite them — not every Member State and not every vendor myth. Coverage map lists what we still refuse to invent.

Is this legal advice?

No. If it were, you’d have a billable hour and a longer PDF. This is a dated operator reference written by an email geek. Confirm anything high-stakes with counsel who knows your facts. Same for “will this make me compliant?” — no tool does that. Lawyers and judges do. We say what the sources say and what to do first on Monday.

Why no trust score out of 100?

Because we refuse to invent a number you can’t audit. Fake scores sell seed tests and panic. You get findings, dates, and links. If that feels less exciting than a red dial, good — you’re not the red-dial customer.

Why should I trust you more than my ESP’s blog?

ESPs sell seats. Seed-score vendors sell fear. AI invents citations when nobody watches. We sell nothing today — no pixels, no placement scores, no affiliate — so we can say when a tool is the problem. A human verifies, dates, and corrects in public. Tools may help draft; they do not ship unsourced claims. Check the primary links. Fail that test and leave.

Do I need an account?

No. Filters live in this browser and the URL. Share the link. That’s it. Accounts come later only if they earn it — not so we can nurture you about email.

I’m an agency. Where’s multi-client mode?

We tried a client-name CRM on the setup card. It made the product feel like work before it felt useful. Role filters + copy link + one-page brief (optional PDF title) is enough for now. Complexity comes back when the free shelf is habit, not before.

Is the quiet changelog a bug?

No. Quiet means nothing material moved. We don’t invent urgency so the homepage looks “alive.” Sticky risks still show what usually needs a person when the market is still.