Low complaint rates are not always good

Digging another old blog post out of the archives. In November 2011, I talked about how part of the Holomaxx complaint against Microsoft and Yahoo said that their complaint rates were below 0.5% and 0.1%. The argument was that if their complaint rates were low, then the mail must not be spam.

Specifically, HolomaXx alleges, its Microsoft complaint rates have been consistently at or below 0.5 percent and its Yahoo complaint rates have been at or below 0.1 percent.
Spam-complaint rates are a significant metric ISPs use to determine if incoming email is wanted by recipients or not.

Senders still seem to focus on the complaint rate. The problem is they don’t understand how ISPs measure the complaint rate. First off 0.5% is actually a high complaint rate. More importantly ISPs only allow complaints for mail that makes it to the inbox. If mail is blocked during the SMTP transaction or filtered into the bulk folder, users cannot complain.
I’ll say it again, because it is critically important to understand.
Bad senders who do not get email to the inbox have very low complaint rates.
Why? ISPs measure complaints as a percentage of the emails that make it to the inbox. If mail is not hitting the inbox then the complaint rates are zero.
I understand this is a bit of a catch 22, in that to get a good reputation you need to get mail to the inbox and to get mail to the inbox you need a good reputation. But I hear a lot of spammers tell me they absolutely can’t be sending spam because their complaint rates are so low and it’s just not true.
 
 

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Dealing with complaints

There are a lot of people who abuse online services and use online services to abuse and harass other people. But handling complaints and handling the abuse are often afterthoughts for many new companies. They don’t think about how to accept and process complaints until they show up. Nor do they think about how bad people can abuse a system before hand.
But dealing with complaints is important and can be complicated. I’ve written many a complaint handling process document over the years, but even I was impressed with the Facebook flowchart that’s been passed around recently.

In the email space, though, all too many companies just shrug off complaints. They don’t really pay attention to what recipients are saying and treat complaints merely as unsubscribe requests. Their whole goal is to keep complaints below the threshold that gets them blocked at ISPs. To be fair, this isn’t as true with ESPs as it is with direct senders, many ESPs pay a lot of attention to complaints and will, in fact, initiate an investigation into a customer’s practice on a report from a trusted complainant.
There are a lot of legitimate email senders out there who value quantity over quality when it comes to complaints. But that doesn’t mean their lists are good or clean or they won’t see delivery problems or SBL listings at some point.

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Monetizing the complaint stream

What if ESPs (and ISPs, for that matter) started charging users for every complaint generated? Think of it like peak pricing for electricity. In California, businesses can opt for discounted power, with the agreement that they are the first companies shut off if electrical demand exceeds supply. What if ESPs and ISPs offered discounted hosting rates to bulk senders who agreed to pay per complaint?
I see pricing scheme something like this.

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I’ve been sitting on this one for about a week, after the folks over at IBM/Pivotal Veracity called me to tell me about this. But now their post is out, so I can share.
There are ISPs providing real metrics to senders: QQ and Mail.ru. Check out Laura Villevieille’s blog post for the full details.

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