Handling spam complaints from recipients
If recipients are marking your campaign emails as spam, take immediate action:
- Impact — Spam complaints are the most damaging signal to your sender reputation. Even 1-2 complaints per 1,000 emails can significantly lower your domain reputation with Gmail and Outlook.
- What WarmySender can and cannot see — we cannot see spam complaints on your campaigns, and it is better you know that now than wait for a warning that will never arrive. Your campaigns send from your own connected mailbox, so when someone clicks 'Report spam' the report goes to their mailbox provider and never reaches us. Nothing here counts complaints, and no campaign is paused because of them. Track your complaint rate where it is actually reported — Google Postmaster Tools for Gmail, Microsoft SNDS for Outlook — aiming to stay under 0.1%. WarmySender's automatic protection is bounce-based: a campaign whose bounce rate crosses its threshold is paused for you.
3) Immediate steps:
- Pause the campaign manually if it has not auto-paused.
- Review your email content — is it clearly irrelevant or overly aggressive?
- Check your prospect list quality — are you sending to the right audience?
- Verify your unsubscribe link is visible and working.
4) Root causes and fixes:
- Wrong audience — Sending B2B emails to B2C contacts, or irrelevant industry targeting. Fix: Clean your list and improve targeting.
- Aggressive content — Hard-sell language, excessive frequency, or misleading subject lines. Fix: Soften your approach and add more value.
- No relationship — Cold emailing people who have zero context about you. Fix: Add a warm touchpoint first (LinkedIn view/connect, referral mention).
- Missing unsubscribe — Although WarmySender adds unsubscribe links automatically, check that your email template does not accidentally hide or override them.
- Old data — Emailing contacts from outdated lists (people who changed jobs). Fix: Re-verify lists and remove stale contacts.
5) Recovery:
- If the campaign was paused for safety, it stays paused until you resume it — fix the cause first, then click Resume.
- Clean your prospect list — remove contacts in industries or roles with high complaint rates.
- Reduce daily volume to 10-15 emails/day.
- Run warmup in Recovery mode for 2-3 weeks.
- Monitor Health Score — resume campaigns only when it recovers above 70.