Glossary Deliverability
What is a spam complaint rate? Gmail's limit
A spam complaint is recorded when a recipient clicks "Report spam" (or similar) on your email, and the spam complaint rate is the share of delivered emails that receive one.
Google asks senders to keep the spam rate shown in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%, and advises aiming below 0.1%. Other providers track complaints in similar ways.
Complaints usually come from email that feels irrelevant, too frequent or hard to stop. A clear way to opt out lowers them, because people unsubscribe instead.
Why it matters
- Complaints are among the strongest negative signals a provider sees.
- A handful from a small mailbox can be a high rate, fast.
- They are direct feedback that the targeting or the message is wrong.
How Reach Crew handles it
Reach Crew pauses a mailbox on any spam complaint, so one bad send cannot keep hurting your reputation. Every first email carries a one-click unsubscribe header and a plain line saying to reply "no", so stopping is easier than reporting.
Related terms
- Sender reputation. Sender reputation is the trust that mailbox providers such as Gmail and Outlook place in a sending domain or...
- Unsubscribe. An unsubscribe, or opt-out, is a way for a recipient to tell a sender to stop emailing them, which the sender...
- One-click unsubscribe. One-click unsubscribe is an email standard (RFC 8058) in which the sender adds List-Unsubscribe and...
- Email deliverability. Email deliverability is the share of the emails you send that land in the recipient's inbox, rather than in...