Abuse Reports
When people receive email that they think is spam, they can just click a button in their email client to label it as such. In most cases, once that button has been clicked, an abuse report is created and sent to the recipient’s email program or ISP. If enough of these reports are received, an automated warning message will be sent to the sender.
When you use Mailchimp, an abuse complaint will be generated each time someone marks your campaign as spam, thanks to the feedback loop in place for most ISPs. We’ll immediately remove that recipient’s email address from your active list and into the abuse complaints area of your account.
Once abuse complaints reach our threshold, you will receive a warning from our abuse team. If the complaint rates exceed that threshold, your account will be suspended, and our team will need to conduct an investigation into your list collection process.
High levels of spam and abuse from a user can result in the IP addresses being denylisted by ISPs and anti-spam organizations. And, if you use Mailchimp for sending—or any email marketing service, for that matter—that means your emails can affect the deliverability of hundreds of thousands of other legitimate marketers. It’s very serious—one bad apple can truly spoil the whole bunch.
That’s why we’ve developed Omnivore; we’re constantly monitoring incoming complaints, and we have a team of human reviewers that review Mailchimp accounts.
Accidental abuse reports
You don’t have to be a spammer to get reported for spamming. Even legitimate marketers who only use opt-in lists can have their email reported as spam, even if it’s not. Sometimes it’s a simple mistake, like when an user clicks the spam button to unsubscribe from an email.
Since it’s almost inevitable that you’ll receive complaints every now and then, Mailchimp is constantly monitoring abuse reports from ISPs, denylists, and anti-spam networks, so we can immediately pinpoint problems as they arise and investigate the account in question.