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Amazon Flagged us for being too Spammy

Amazon sent me a notice regarding one of my Amazon SES accounts. The complaint rate is 0.51% of the emails. They prefer 0.1% complaint rate or lower, so do I.

After some digging, I found the complaints come from 2 main sources.

  1. Signups of spam accounts, with fake email addresses, complaining they've received our welcome email. This is about half of the complaints.
  2. The other half comes from one email address of one of my customers. It keeps sending complaints. They've actually already changed their email address once. Somehow, they can't figure out why they automatically flag our transactional emails. And they complain with me, they are not receiving our emails.

Solutions for issue #1?

  • Do not send the welcome email
  • Only send the welcome email after the customer did something significant in our web app.
  • Implement a captcha (which I personally hate)
  • Artificially boost the number of emails we send.
  • Block IP subnets with a complaint and multiple signups
  • Any other ideas?

Solutions for issue #2?

  • Do not send the transactional emails, even though the customers does want to receive our email.
  • The complaints seem like they are subject related. We could add random info to the subject and body. But that just feels wrong.
  • Do not send one email to multiple addresses, via CC. Because it looks like Amazon SES flags all email address, even though only one recipient complained.
  • Any other ideas?
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