Spike in Outlook.com (all Microsoft?) complaint rates

6

There's a bug at Outlook.com (maybe other Microsoft domains) that's over-reporting complaints. I think it might be similar to the bug described here. In our case, although Outlook.com is <1% of our volume it started accounting for 20%+ of our complaints. Consistent with the linked bug, this high complaint rate has not affected our Outlook.com deliverability at all.

However, last week we stopped sending to @Outlook.com to keep our SES complaint rates in a safe range.

Is SES aware of this bug and are they accounting for it in the complaint review process? Any details you could share would be helpful!

asked 2 years ago1058 views
10 Answers
4

The internal SES team has contacted Microsoft regarding the issue being discussed in this thread and the team believes that the SES service was never impacted by this issue. If you are continuing to receive irregular complaints from Microsoft recipients and you are concerned about your sender reputation, please reach out to support or Microsoft directly.

AWS
SUPPORT ENGINEER
answered 2 years ago
  • The SES service is absolutely impacted by this issue. I have confirmed this in discussions with both AWS support (see case ID 9507217981) and by contacting my customers directly. We've been getting bogus "complaints" about things like password reset emails, which almost never generate complaints. When I have reached out to our customers using my personal email address to ask if they marked our messages as spam, they say: "Nope, went straight to junk with no intervention or action on my part.” I have confirmed this behavior with multiple affected users.

  • +1 what uhhujorbfy said. SES was absolutely affected by this issue.

    Can anyone here comment on whether this is still happening? We've nearly stopped sending to MS domains because of this issue, and I'm curious if we should be able to restart.

  • @AWS-User-8949122 It's still happening, it's still a problem.

  • Starting today we are also seeing this issue: extremely elevated complaint rates across all types of mailings, but all coming from Microsoft-related email addresses. As a result the Complaint Rate in our Reputation Metrics is growing and we are not sure what to do about this. It went beyond Warning and is now moving towards Account at Risk.

    Please advice what we should do. Thank you!

  • I have the same issue with ms-related email addresses. The complaint rate is growing on emails like reset password. My details are here: https://repost.aws/questions/QUeqfm1S8vSLuUp3oceqWJ8w/ses-complaint-rate-unexpectedly-increasing-for-months Please let me know what we should do. Thanks!

1

We are in the same boat. Our experience is almost exactly the same as Sparkpost described here:

https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/industry-alert-microsoft-complaints-artificially-increased/

We have been getting "complaints" about things like password reset emails (which are very, very rarely complained about, obviously). When I have reached out to these customers to ask if they complained about these messages, they say that they have not. AWS support seems to be aware of the issue, but SES has not made any changes to the way they calculate complaint rate, even though they are getting garbage data from Microsoft. This is ridiculous, and now I'm in the same boat where I have to wonder if it's necessary to stop using AWS services here.

answered 2 years ago
1

We have exactly the same issue with complaint. I've described it here: https://repost.aws/questions/QUeqfm1S8vSLuUp3oceqWJ8w/ses-complaint-rate-unexpectedly-increasing-for-months I did not receive any answer from AWS and I do not know what to do.

answered 2 years ago
1

This problem still seems to be there. After sending hundreds of thousands of emails, we see a clear pattern in the log. Dozens of complaint reports from addresses like hotmail.com, live.com, outlook.com. Is there any update from Microsoft or AWS on this?

answered 2 years ago
0

Hello,

Thanks for your patience on this question. I wanted to do a bit of research internally here at AWS to see if our teams have been in contact with Microsoft regarding this issue. Our internal team said Microsoft did confirm this is a known issue on their side, but they do not have any additional updates at this time.

Microsoft Community does have a reference to complaint rates and suggestions on how to approach the issue (1). I would recommend reach-out to Microsoft to see if they have anything official published.

Resources

  1. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/spam-filter-bug/072ae551-4fd3-486d-b7c8-4d1b4e67b746
AWS
SUPPORT ENGINEER
Ron_H
answered 2 years ago
  • @Ron - Thank you for the reply.

    1. Does this bug affect only Outlook.com email addresses, or all Microsoft accounts (eg. @hotmail.com, @msn.com, etc)?

    2. Is the SES complaint enforcement accounting for this bug? Specifically, if this bug causes some SES accounts to exceed the complaint threshold, will the SES account still be put on warning?

0

Hello, I am reaching out as an SES daily user because we are experiencing the same exact behaviour concerning an increasing amount of complaints coming from Microsoft type emails (outlook.com, hotmail.com, live.com). Our account has already been put under review in the past by the SES team, and we are afraid this would repeat again. But it seems like the solution to the problem is not in our hands now and we feel powerless. What could we do to avoid this situation? And is SES going to take into account these informations when evaluating our reputation?

Thanks in advance for any kind of help.

answered 2 years ago
  • Hello Beesbusy! I don't know how notifications work in this new UI, so I just wanted to let you know I posted a reply to you down below :)

0

We are seeing the same issue with a very similar profile to others. It started in September 2021 for us.

A very small percentage of our sent emails go to Outlook and other Microsoft domains but almost all complaints are from these domains.

The system I maintain only sends transactional email so complaints are (or were) generally very rare and nothing about our emails has changed.

We have a class of user that use our systems and email notifications to run their business so when it is has happened with their email our customer services team have contacted them directly to offer assistance. In these cases the user had not complained but the email had gone to the junk mail box and generated a complaint notification anyway. The only solution we have is to ask users to add our sending address to their safe senders list or suppress sending to that email address.

This is obviously an Outlook bug but Outlook support response was unhelpful and terse to the point where I thought it was an autogenerated placeholder notification.

It would be very helpful if AWS could use their influence to raise this issue with Outlook at a higher level and request that they investigate why complaints are being generated without any user action. I don't know if AWS engineers have access to the aggerate complaint data for all accounts but I would guess that the uptick in complaints from Outlook etc addresses and no others would be clearly seen across a number of different accounts and could be used as evidence of an issue.

kevinc
answered 2 years ago
  • Can you share any details about your sending? For example: volume, complaint rate (before/after), and any actions taken by SES enforcement?

0

@Beesbusy -

Thank you for adding a reply! This is the OP. Would you mind sharing some details of your sending? We're in a similar situation to you, and everything related to SES is so opaque I would love to learn from your experience.

Our Background:

  • We send ~120k emails / day (92% to Gmail)
  • Our historical complaint rate is ~0.05%, but due to our small volume, it fluctuates between 0.01%-0.07%.
  • We have never exceeded the 0.1% complaint threshold
  • Recently, due to the MS bug, our complaint rate increased to 0.08%. I freaked out, investigated, and realized the cause... and the only solution I could think of was to suppress all Microsoft emailing. We did that ~7d ago and our complaint rate is returning to normal, but I'm still getting old complaints flowing in from emails we sent long ago.

Can you share your background? Some specific questions:

  • What's your sending volume?
  • What's your historical complaint rate? And what is it now?
  • What happened when you exceeded the 0.1% threshold? The more detail you could share here the better

Due to this, I have a demo with SparkPost today because we're planning to expand to send from multiple ESPs. The thing that really stinks is that we have ~5 years of infrastructure built on SES (so this is a costly migration), I don't know if the migration is necessary (ie. I don't know what happens if we exceed 0.1%), and our only solution thus far is to suppress emailing to MS which affects our business.

Looking forward to your reply!

answered 2 years ago
0

Any updates on this? It's still happening we're getting lots of fake complaints from live.com, hotmail.com, msn.com and outlook.com.

This is seriously impacting us, 😭

answered a year ago
0

We still see quite a lot of complaints from the various flavours of Outlook. The only other source of complaint we have had for a long time is Yahoo. This is surprising as we send relatively few emails to either of these services. We do a lot of B2B so I assume a lot of our customers use corporate Outlook but we do not see the same problems there so this seem specific to the free email offerings.

The number of complaints did seem to be diminishing for a while but something has obviously happened in Outlook at they have risen again over the last few months. There are early signs that complaints are diminishing again but it who knows how long this will last.

Note that emails we are sending out are all transactional in response to action taken by a user and non-Outlook complaints are very rare.

answered 10 months ago

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