This is a problem with the spam filter policies of the major providers (gmail, yahoo, outlook). I’m having the same problem. There needs to be some sort of organized protest.
They will permanently (I waited over a month) send all your emails from the shared Amazon SES IP range to spam if 0.3% of people mark it as spam. This is not a reasonable thing to do. People were taught for years to mark emails as spam instead of unsubscribing since unsubscribing can confirm your email to spammers. 1% of people may also simply be dumb, or may be sabotaging your business on purpose. Many people are ignorant or rude or both and use the SPAM button as a convenient way to organize their email.
For years, I’ve been responding to people who applied via a Google form on our website (1.2+ million at this point). When simply sending a first email telling them “you did or did not qualify”, the Amazon SES complaint rate has always averaged between 0.3% and 0.5%, and the Google Postmaster rate always jumps between 0%-2%. There’s nothing that can be done to bring the rates down besides sending people unnecessary emails in order to lower the average. So sending people actual spam is the only way to decrease the spam rate below that extremely low level…
There are times when 50% of my incoming [gmail] emails go to spam. When I contacted Outlook about this their response went to my Outlook junk folder.
I’ve done everything in my power to highlight the option to unsubscribe instead of mark an email as spam, including the ridiculous step of opening the email with “You’re receiving this email because of xyz. Please blocklist your email if you don’t want any more” instead of “Hi, here are the details of an important update”.
Yahoo said I should request a better IP pool from Amazon SES. I said:
Amazon SES does not have an option to “request a better IP pool”. Asking them to assign another IP pool to my account doesn’t seem like a valid solution anyway. There’s no reason to believe that their other IP pools aren’t experiencing the same problem, or will experience the same problem at any given point. I’m very surprised that your system is this unsophisticated. I should be able to use Amazon SES without all my emails going to spam.
I searched Hacker News and found loads of other people with the same problem. People need to protest this terrible policy.