How complaints affect reputation

Every Wooxy account has a reputation and a sending quota. These two features help protect us from spammers who would otherwise send a high volume of emails quickly, which could damage the reputation of our sending servers and negatively affect other Wooxy users.

Account’s reputation can be Bad, Poor, Medium, or Good. Wooxy uses multiple heuristics to determine account reputation. We review the number of bounces, spam complaints, unsubscribes, and failed content reviews to determine the account's reputation value. For example, the more bounces and spam complaints there are relative to overall sending volume, the lower the reputation will be.
Learn more about the factors we use to determine account reputation and how to improve a Poor reputation.

A spam complaint occurs when a recipient clicks on the ‘report spam’ button in their mailbox.

In general, industry standards recommend a complaint rate under 1%. Since 2024, Google and Yahoo have introduced new spam rate requirements, recommending a threshold below 0.3%. However, as of late 2025, these two providers have tightened their rules, setting a strict 0.3% limit that must not be exceeded. In the future, these rigorous requirements are expected to be adopted by all ISPs. When sending emails long enough, spam complaints are inevitable, but a large number of complaints can mean that recipients don’t recognize why they’re receiving emails, don’t recall signing up for emails, or that their email addresses weren’t provided directly.

At certain spam complaint thresholds, ISPs may begin routing all r email to spam folders, completely block r email, or blacklist Wooxy sending IPs. Like most ESPs, Wooxy actively manages the IP addresses used to send email through our system. The reputation of our IP addresses is paramount to ensuring high deliverability for all of our users. 
Read more about Reasons for High Complaint Rates and How to Reduce SPAM Complaints.

Bounces are undeliverable emails, typically because the receiving server or mailbox encountered a delivery issue.

While bounces are considered normal when sending email over a period of time, industry standards generally suggest that the overall hard bounce rate should be below 2% of total email volume. At this level, some receiving servers may begin blocking mail or reduce how quickly they accept it, resulting in delivery delays.

Wooxy needs to send an email quickly, with minimal delay from receiving servers. The reputation of our IP addresses is paramount to ensuring high deliverability for all of our users.

Bounce rate thresholds fluctuate over time based on factors like the incoming volume to a particular ISP. Because of this, and to avoid providing insight that could help spammers game the system, ISPs don’t publicly release their thresholds and schedules. We recommend aiming for a rate below 2%, but note that this is a rule of thumb and may vary by ISP and other factors.

Read more about Reasons for High Bounce Rates and how to prevent Bounces.

An unsubscribe occurs when someone clicks an auto-generated unsubscribe link in an email or the unsubscribe button in their email program.

When ISPs see high unsubscribe rates, they may slow or even stop accepting r email due to concerns about recipient management or permission issues.

Read more about Reasons for High Unsubscribe Rates and How to Reduce Unsubscribes.

Also read our Reputation-related blog posts: