Spam Complaint Monitoring and Control

We monitor and control spam complains for all of our clients (whether shared or dedicated hosting).  When a site sends spam people complain.  When people complain the sites email reputation becomes bad.  When a sites email reputation is bad they, and potentially other sites on the same server, experience poor delivery rates and often end up in the spam folder or completely blocked.

Spam Complaint Reports

We have spam reports so we can see which sites are sending spam and which members from those sites are doing it.  We use this to issue warnings, suspend members, and isolate and group servers that have poor reputation.  The data from these reports are collected 2 ways:

Report Spam Link
Every email sent to contacts has a report spam link at the bottom.  When a person clicks this link they are automatically inactivated to prevent future complaints from the same person.

Feedback Loops
We register with major feedback loops (Yahoo, AOL, etc) so that when someone reports spam to them we are notified.  When we receive these notifications the email is inactivated to prevent future complaints.

Blacklist Removal

We monitor blacklists and apply for removal when a site has been blacklisted.

Email Overages to Control Spam

Every team or pro system we host includes 10,000 emails a month.  We charge on a per email basis for emails sent beyond this.  Systems on dedicated servers are not charged this fee since the server is not in our name.  This is a way we control spam by charging people for emails a very small fee to discourage spam.  The fee is very small, a fraction of a cent, but it helps prevent other clients on the same server from sending spam. If you are hit with a big invoice for sending spam, if you agree to let us delete all imported contacts from the system and block malicious members we will give you a 50% discount.  When our clients send spam it costs us money so we cannot give any further discounts regardless of the situation.

Additional Things You Can Do to Prevent Spam

• Monitor Your Members - We have minimum standards we set as to what percentage of emails sent can be reported as spam before we take additional action.  You can set for yourself even higher standards to give yourself an even better reputation and email delivery rate.
• Limit Emails - With a Pro system you can limit the amount of emails members of a membership can send.  Doing this will prevent members from sending lots of spam before it even stops.  Monitoring is good but you are only monitoring complaints after they already happen.  By limiting the amount of emails they can send you limit how much damage can be done by one person.
• Monitor Email Subjects - In the report center you can easily see a list of all the subjects of emails that are being sent.  Spam is typically not just emails sent to people who don't want to receive them, but also people receiving emails that appear like spam.  A person might have opted into your page but when you start sending them emails telling them they received payments when they didn't, or other similar tactics marketers use to trick people into opening an email, can cause a person that opted in to report you as sending spam.
• Follow Best Practices - We have other articles with recommendations for best practices when sending emails.  Also if your check sites like senderscore.org they give you many pointers on what to do to limit complaints.  By following these best practices you can greatly reduce the amount of spam complaints you receive and get much better delivery to inboxes.

Questions And Answers

How can I setup my software to make sure I do not get charged overages for emails?

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