Understanding SES Historic Complaint rate "Percentages"

Question

Is the **SES Complaint rate %** based on the overall number of emails sent?
For example if I sent 100 emails and had 10 complaints, my Historic complaint rate is 10%.
If I send another 100 emails and had 5 complaints, shouldn't my Historic complaint rate decrease to 7.5%?

My first email campaign was sent to 5159 recipients & after 30 hours the complaint rate was about 0.36%. This puts me above "Warning" but below "At Risk." I spent a few hours removing all the addresses that bounced or had complaints from my subscription list & acquired new subscribers (all new subscribers must verify emails).

A week later I sent another email campaign to the remaining 4915 subscribers and from that number I had less than 10 complaints, but my Historic complaint rate increased. I did some more cleaning on my list but acquired new subscribers.

Yesterday I sent a 3rd campaign to 4,948 recipients and again I had less than 10 complaints.
My Historic bonce rate decreased, but the Historic complaint rate keeps increasing despite the number of complaints per campaign being less. I am now at 0.46% Historic complaint rate (just 0.04% from being At Risk).

I don't believe my Historic complaint rate is being calculated based on a percentage my total emails sent via SES.
Am I incorrect?
If not, what steps should I take to bring attention to this?

Best regards.

Answer

Did you ever figure this out?

Answer

I have the exact same issue. I believe the Reputation.ComplaintRate is calculated wrong, it doesn't get lower over time, even though I've totally eliminated complaints!

Answer

The complaint rate calculation has a bug, it's showing a totally different value compared to what's the real metrics give by total(complaint) / total(sent).

I've spent some time writing this script to calculate the correct value.

Please submit it to the technical team to review, I don't have that level of subscription.

```
SEND=$(aws cloudwatch get-metric-statistics \
  --namespace AWS/SES --metric-name Send \
  --start-time 2023-01-01 --end-time 2024-01-01 \
  --period 864000000 --statistics Sum --query 'Datapoints[0].Sum')

BOUNCE=$(aws cloudwatch get-metric-statistics \
  --namespace AWS/SES --metric-name Bounce \
  --start-time 2023-01-01 --end-time 2024-01-01 \
  --period 864000000 --statistics Sum --query 'Datapoints[0].Sum')
    
COMPLAINT=$(aws cloudwatch get-metric-statistics \
  --namespace AWS/SES --metric-name Complaint \
  --start-time 2023-01-01 --end-time 2024-01-01 \
  --period 864000000 --statistics Sum --query 'Datapoints[0].Sum')
    
BOUNCE_RATE=$(bc <<< "scale=4; ($BOUNCE/$SEND)*100")
COMPLAINT_RATE=$(bc <<< "scale=4; ($COMPLAINT/$SEND)*100")

echo "bounce rate: $BOUNCE_RATE%"
echo "complaint rate: $COMPLAINT_RATE%"
```

Understanding SES Historic Complaint rate "Percentages"

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