Last Friday, I received the following email from InfusionSoft, the email service I am using for our newsletters and auto-responders:

We have received notification from several Internet Service Providers that your recipients are reporting your emails as spam at a rate which exceeds their allowed thresholds. In order to prevent any further spam complaints from your contacts and to protect your email sending reputation, we have temporarily disabled all email sending capabilities.
To restore email sending service to your Infusionsoft application and learn how you can prevent future spam complaints, please contact the Infusionsoft Customer Care Staff at the information listed below.

FYI: this threshold is normally set at 0.1%, which means that you are allowed one spam complaint for every thousand emails you send.

We did send out our monthly Collectorz.com Newsletter on Wednesday, but this newsletter is quite popular among our subscribers. So I am surprised if we would suddenly get a lot of spam complaints about it.

Of course I checked my Spam Complaints reports inside the InfusionSoft system. It showed 12 spam complaints for this newsletter, for about 100 thousand emails sent! That’s not too bad, is it? At least way below the 0.1% threshold.

Maybe one or more ISPs did get a higher percentage of spam complaints, fine.
But what bothers me is that InfusionSoft just disabled my email sending capabilities without waiting for my response. And then their email just tells me to “contact them”, without any hint as to what exactly has caused the problem, what actions I should take to resolve it or what information they need from me in my response.

Of course, I did reply to their email right away, giving them as much information as possible, about my list, my autoresponder sequences and the newsletter we had just sent out. But no reply from InfusionSoft until now, other then a reminder of the disabled state on Saturday.

Guess they are not working weekends. I am though and my business is continuing in the weekends too, for us these are the best days of the week. But not now, because my autoresponders are not working.

Anyway, looks I will have to call them tomorrow. Sigh…

Sorry for the rant, just had to vent my frustration. But there is a lesson here too:

Autoresponders are a great way to raise conversions, both on the front-end and on the back-end. But make sure sure your business does not fully rely on them. Because one spam compaint too many, and you’re out.