Spam Complaints Over Time Report

What Is the Spam Complaints Over Time Report 

The Spam Complaints Over Time report shows the number of spam complaints received from several ISPs. This report is divided into time intervals, with both the send and the complaint bucketed into the period during which the send occurred.

Note: If an email domain returns no spam complaints for the time period you specified, then there will be no entry for that domain shown in the report. This isn't a delivery report and doesn't display counts of emails sent for domains that had no complaints recorded

The Spam Complaints Over Time report contains a pie chart showing the top domains you received spam compalints from. You configure how many domains you want displayed in the pie chart when you run the report. The report also shows a table with the following information for each time interval:

The report also contains the thresholds that some of the ISPs use to determine when to block your emails. If your spam complaint rate is greater than the threshold value for the ISP, the ISP may block your email sends.

Note: Some of the values in the report appear green. This will only happen for aol.com, msn.com, hotmail.com, and yahoo.com. Green indicates that the bounce percentage is within the percentage noted for those domains in the top portion of the report. If the value exceeds the number defined in the top portion, the numbers turn red. Red numbers mean you should investigate why you're receiving bounces. 

So why use bucketing? The bucketing process clarifies complaint ratios-especially when displaying data breakdown by Day. For example, suppose that you send an email with 10 subscribers on Tuesday. You receive no complaints about that email on Tuesday. However, you get one complaint on Wednesday and one on Thursday. If you look in the tracking section of the application, you see one complaint recorded for Wednesday and one for Thursday. When you run the report, though, you see the two complaints and 10 sends on Tuesday. This works out to a 20 percent complaint rate because all complaints are bucketed with the sends.

What would happen to the ratios if the sends and complaints fell into different buckets? In this example, you send to 10 subscribers on Tuesday and receive no complaints. This equals a complaint rate of zero percent. But on Wednesday, zero sends and one complaint occur-for a complaint rate of more than 100 percent! Again, on Thursday, a 100+ percent complaint rate is recorded.

By bucketing all the complaints with the sends, you get the more accurate 20 percent complaint rate.

Why Run the Spam Complaints Over Time Report

Run the Spam Complaints Over Time report to evaluate your success in creating emails that subscribers want to receive. You can also run this report to help determine how clean your mailing list is.

How to Run the Spam Complaints Over Time Report

Use the following steps to run the report:

1. Click the Tracking tab in the navigation bar.
2. Click my reports.
3. Click Tracking Reports.
4. Click Spam Complaints Over Time.
5. Complete the information in the Report Parameters section:

   Start Date	The first date for which information is included in the report.
   End Date	the last date for which information is included in the report.
   Period	The time interval into which the report data is grouped.
   Top N for Chart	The number of "slices" you want displayed in the pie chart. For example, if you enter 10, the top 10 domains to send spam complaints will be represented in the pie chart. Note that the higher the number, the more difficult it'll be to read the pie chart.
   Date Range	This field is available only if you are using a report activity. Valid values include: Custom Date Range Provides fields to specify a static date range. These are the same fields that appear if you are not using a report activity to run the report. Start Date The earliest date for which to include information in the report. End Date The latest date for which to include information in the report. Previous Time Period Provides a field to select the time period over which to run the report. The period is relative to when the report runs.
   Exclude Single Sends	Determines whether the report includes information for single sends-a special kind of send that can be initiated only by an API call.
   Time Zone	The time zone in which you wish the results of the report to appear
   Date Format	The format in which dates appear in the report

6. Complete the information in the Report Results Delivery section. If you choose to send as an email, separate multiple email addresses with a semi-colon, but note the field has a 100 character limit. 
7. Complete the information in the Result File Format section.
8. Complete the information in the Run the Report section.
9. Click Submit.