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| A spam complaint (also known as an abuse report) is defined as “the result of the action taken by an email subscriber when they click the ‘report as spam”‘ button in their inbox, which is then directed back to the originating sender in the form of an ARF-formatted Feedback Loop (FBL). Most major ISPs offer a ‘Feedback Loop’ as a free service. The list of ISPs that offer such a service change frequently.
ARF (Abuse Reporting Format) is a machine-readable format called that redacts some personally identifiable information. These reports should be processed promptly, and the complainants removed immediately upon receipt. Most of the time, this process will be handled by the ESP that is sending the email. The length of time allowed for suppression to occur varies by law and country, so ‘immediately’ is the best practice.
The number of complaints generated is given great weight by receivers, though ISPs will not reveal what the threshold is as it is part of their spam filtering recipe and will vary from ISP to ISP. A good reputation allows slightly more forgiveness than a poor one. That being the case, keeping complaints as low as possible is the prudent thing to do. |