Intro to Communication Preferences

Configuring email in Rock involves more than just sending messages; it's about safeguarding your communication channels and maintaining a positive sender reputation. Why? Because when your emails get marked as spam, it can harm your reputation and impact whether your messages reach their intended recipients. Not to mention the possible legal consequences.

Consider this: even if someone signed up for your emails, they might still report them as spam if they can't easily find the unsubscribe option. Or worse, they might start to unsubscribe but then resort to marking your emails as spam if the process isn't straightforward. That's why it's crucial to make unsubscribing as effortless as possible.

This is especially true for Gmail accounts. Gmail specifies that everyone must “make it easy for recipients to unsubscribe” and “if you send more than 5,000 messages per day, your marketing and subscribed messages must support one-click unsubscribe.” Gmail also indicates that if your unsubscribe method involves sending an email, the request to unsubscribe must be processed within two days. Why all the focus on Gmail? Well, with over 1.5 billion active accounts, it’s probably used by many in your target audience, so we want to ensure we're sticking to their guidelines.

We also look to Gmail's rules because they will help cover you from a legal perspective. Gmail policies are more stringent than the US CAN-SPAM Act, which also has requirements related to unsubscribing. Adherence to the CAN-SPAM Act is crucial. Otherwise you expose your organization to potential legal action and hefty fines from the FTC.

Now, let's talk about how Rock can help you comply with these requirements. We've designed features to streamline the unsubscribing process. For more details on these settings, see the Communication Mediums section above.

With the above configuration in place, your emails will have an “Unsubscribe” option as pictured below.

Unsubscribing

It's very important that recipients of your emails have a way to unsubscribe from future emails, and that requests to unsubscribe are processed in a timely manner. Failure to do so can have legal implications, including fines of up to $51,744 for each individual email sent. Not to mention, your email reputation (a metric used by ISPs to help determine if your organization's email is spam) will suffer, resulting in a loss of deliverability.

Spam Reporting

When you send an email, the recipient can report the email as spam. When this happens, Mailgun and SendGrid can report it back to Rock through their APIs. Rock will then find the person and inactivate their email address in the system and add a note to their record. The note indicates that the email address was deactivated due to a spam complaint and includes the date of the complaint.

In order for this to happen, in Mailgun you would need to set up a webhook of type Spam Complaints. In SendGrid you'll want to update the Event Webhook to include "Spam Reports" under Engagement Data.