Unsubscribes, Bounces, Complaints

BigMailer automatically handles bounces, unsubscribes, and complaints. Those contacts are not deleted  from your Lists, but rather tagged with a status for appropriate action. When a contact hard bounces or complaints, they are not sent emails again. An unsubscribe stops receiving future emails unless they are deleted from BigMailer and then re-added to the list so it's best to never delete contacts based on the subscription status.

By default, BigMailer treats a contact as undeliverable after it soft bounces 12 times for accounts that were created after November 2021 and 5 times for older accounts. You control this setting on your Brand settings page and can set it to any value. The most common reason for a soft-bounce is mailbox full, so consider your email frequency when changing this setting. Other reasons for soft bounces are: mailbox provider service down, email rejected, email size too large.

You can configure a webhook to send events (bounces, complaints, and unsubscribes) to your application - get started on your API page. See this article for best practices and code samples.

Hard bounces can be periodically deleted by you to avoid paying for unusable contacts. See List Management section for instructions on exporting and deleting list segments.

All your contacts included in the exports by default, including bounces, complaints, and unsubscribes. To export only some contacts you can use segmentation on the export page to specify which segment(s) you want to include or exclude in your export.

When importing your your exported list back into BigMailer make sure to use "Skip this field" option to not import some of the stats as custom fields, to not clutter your UI with extra field data.

What is a complaint?

A complaint means the email recipient either marked the email as Spam or clicked a Complaint icon (Gmail has it as an icon and not as a text label) - it's a manual and deliberate action although not completely impossible to happen in error. BigMailer treats a complaint as an unsubscribe and never sends future emails to anyone who complained in the past. A complaint rate should be below 0.1% for good deliverability and to avoid Amazon SES account suspension.

A complaint rate is typically higher for:

1. Cold outreach campaigns (these type of emails are against BigMailer terms of service).
2. Emails to purchased/renter lists. Buying lists is a bad idea and rarely works out for the sender. This is because email recipients don't expect emails from the sender and complaint at higher rate, which damages sender reputation in the long term.
3. Emails with unsubscribe link hidden, pushed down with space, or hard to locate. It's best to use a clear text label like "Unsubscribe" or "Opt-out" on the unsubscribe link in the same or larger font size as the main body. This is because mailbox providers scan the email looking for unsubscribe link and it can make a difference for deliverability and inbox placement. The harder it is to unsubscribe, the higher the complaint rate.