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.
- Automatic protection — WarmySender tracks spam complaints. If complaints exceed your campaign's threshold (default: 3), the campaign enters Cooldown mode and stops sending.
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- Old data — Emailing contacts from outdated lists (people who changed jobs).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:
- Let the campaign Cooldown complete (24+ hours).
- 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.