Overview

A Complaint Alert notifies an Advertiser or Network if email recipients continue to receive emails after unsubscribing.  The information below explains the functionality behind this alert.

How do Complaint Alerts Work?

The mechanism for these Complaint Alerts resides on the Opt-Out pages themselves. A recipient can click the link in the bottom right corner of the page that says "Still receiving email after unsubscribing?"

and check their email address against your Suppression List.

If their address is on the Suppression List and has been there for more than 10 days, we instantly generate a unique email address for them and ask them to forward the message they received for further investigation. Whatever they send to that address is what you see as the Complaint.

The recipient would have to perform this process through an Opt-out Link from your account in order for the system to give them this email address, which would allow for the Complaint Alert to be sent to your account. So, if you receive a Complaint Alert, the initiator of the complaint did receive an email, check their address against your Suppression List, and that email was identified as being on your list for more than 10 days. However, once they get that email address from our system, they can forward whatever they want to it. The onus is on them to send the correct email for you to investigate.

Our system then parses the email creative in an attempt to gather the original Date, To, From & Subject to help determine the original recipient. Also, the parsed creative is stored separately in the database, so the raw email can be preserved.  You can either view or download the HTML directly from the alert itself.

These alerts are in no way infallible, as there are just too many moving pieces to ensure 100% accuracy, so they require a little investigation and interpretation. The idea is that we want to provide you with as much information as possible, so you can investigate with your mailers to ensure any issues that really are problems, can be resolved.

What Should I do If I Receive a Complaint Alert?

First, you will want to view the Complaint Alert for accuracy.  In most cases, the Alert is valid because a complaint can't be submitted by an email recipient without passing our 2 validation checks: 1st - their email has to currently exist on the Opt-Out List attached to the campaign/offer, and 2nd - their email address has to be on the Opt-Out List for longer than 10 days.

The next step is to notify your mailing partner associated with the Compliant Alert.  You can send the Alert directly to your mailing partner from within SUPPRESS.  

If you have further questions, please contact us: support@optizmo.com