SimpleVerifier Team · Reviewed
What spam complaint rate is too high?
Gmail asks senders to keep the user-reported spam rate below 0.10% and never reach 0.30%; Yahoo names 0.3% as the line. Amazon SES reviews an account at 0.1% and may pause sending at 0.5%, and HubSpot can suspend over 0.1% spam reports in a month. In practice, treat 0.1% as the ceiling.
How it is measured
Google and Yahoo calculate the rate against mail that reached the inbox, not everything you sent. Google Postmaster Tools shows the rate for Gmail traffic. Complaint rate is a separate problem from bounce rate: verification lowers bounces, but only relevance, clear opt-outs and one-click unsubscribe lower complaints.
Related questions
- Do complaints count if the mail went to spam?
- Both Gmail and Yahoo calculate against mail that reached the inbox, so a message filtered to spam before the user saw it generally does not count.
Sources
- Google email sender guidelines
- Yahoo sender requirements and best practices
- Amazon SES enforcement FAQ
- Gmail and Yahoo requirements, side by side (SimpleVerifier)
Figures marked as ours come from SimpleVerifier’s own dated tests on made-up addresses, published with their data on the research page. No customer data is used, and we publish no accuracy percentage because we have no independent measurement to back one.
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