Spam Complaints

Sooner or later, someone is going to mark one of your emails as spam. How does AlumnIQ handle spam complaints, and how should you respond?

How AlumnIQ Handles Spam Complaints

We treat every spam complaint as an unsubscribe request. We unsubscribe both the email address and, when available, the xid from the Subscription Category associated with the email from which they complained, just as if they had clicked the unsubscribe link.

It may be argued that the spam complaint should be treated as a broader intent to unsubscribe from all messages, but we have made the decision not to do that. We have significant doubt that someone clicking the spam button on a communication from a college/university really honestly means "stop talking to me entirely about everything, forever."

And if that is actually their intent, we provide an unsubscribe-all button on the page they see when clicking the Unsubscribe link in the footer of every marketing email.

Note: We do not include unsubscribe links in transactional emails. It is reasonable to expect email confirmations for things like event registrations and gifts, and so there is no mechanism to silence those.

How You Should Respond

As a baseline, you do not need to do anything other than continuing to accurately categorize your outbound messages. AlumnIQ will automatically obey constituent subscription preferences on your behalf.

You may choose to take that signal and put it to use outside of AlumnIQ, for example in your other communications. The AlumnIQ Platform API provides feeds such as /mail/subscription-preference-changes and /mail/subscription-preferences and /mail/messages/unsubscribes where you can find information about complaints and unsubscribes to use as you see fit.