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Comment by richardburton | Hacker News Reader

Free customers are higher maintenance than paying customers ... when I sent a thank you email a couple of days ago to everyone who used the site this Christmas. Many free customers flagged the email as spam!

That is hilarious. I use LOL sparingly but: LOL

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I don't understand why people down voted you, anyway, how do you know your customers have 'flagged the email as spam!' ?

Mailchimp for example, provides this information. It's one reason why Mailchimp and SendGrid et al are so useful. It pays for itself when we send out a newsletter to thousands of emails.

Still doesn't answer the question. How does mailchimp know? Do MUAs commonly send some kind of response to the sender when the user flags a message as spam? Or is this something they're getting via webmail services?

That's a good question I couldn't find the answer for. What I can tell you is what happens as a MailChimp user: if I send out an email and someone clicks the 'this is SPAM' button in their mail client, MailChimp notifies me that this happened so I guess that the email client somehow notifies the sending mail server using the List-Unsubscribe header.

I bet this only work for aol.com and a few others.. I highly doubt that Thunderbird & friends notify the sender. Of course It could be some sort of hack, like the image thing.

If you register your IP with AOL, they send you individual notices when each user marks your mail as spam.

http://postmaster.aol.com/Postmaster.FeedbackLoop.php

I've occasionally seen GMail ask “do you want us to unsubscribe you as well” when flagging stuff as spam (I refuse, because I don't want to confirm my address to spammers). Perhaps some provider has come up with a way to differentiate “mark as spam” from plain “unsubscribe”, but I do find it surprising.

Most likely there's some indirect, aggregate feedback as well.

He's probably using List-unsubscribe. You can add headers to your emails that give users a way to unsubscribe from your list if they click "mark as spam" (and many do, despite an "unsubscribe" link appearing at the bottom of the email).

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