Dealing with Spam Complaints

Senders with high spam complaints may see mail throttled or blocked if they have unresolved spam reports. This guide explains how Twilio SendGrid handles spam complaints, and how you can best avoid them.

Overview

Twilio SendGrid automatically suppresses any addresses reporting spam through traditional feedback loops. However, some webmail providers, notably Gmail, do not provide a traditional feedback loop out of privacy concerns. Rather, they provide an anonymous, aggregate report directly to us about concerning senders.

Since Gmail’s reporting is anonymous, you won’t know specifically who flagged your mail as spam, and you likely won’t know this is an issue until Twilio SendGrid reaches out to you. We recommend users monitor their registered email address with SendGrid to ensure notifications of this type are seen as needed.

Best Practices

If you receive a report about spam complaints, use this as an opportunity to implement better list acquisition and maintenance. We recommend the following best practices:

  • Don’t send email to destinations that have not previously opted in to your campaign. It’s against our Terms of Service, and considered to be spam by the email community.
  • If your list is opt-in, track who’s actually engaging with your email, as measured by click and open tracking. Many customers have this data in their own CRM, or use our Click and Open Tracking apps, coupled with the EventKit to consume this data.
  • For recipients who don’t engage with your email, we recommend you stop sending to them after a period of time that you determine to be appropriate. This tends to be a period between a few weeks to 3 months, depending on your sending frequency. 
  • Evaluate your sending practices with our SEQ score. Details on the score can be found here, and details on how to use it via API can be found here. 
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