Spam complaint webhook

What is a spam complaint webhook? #

A spam complaint is recorded when a user clicks This is Spam or Mark as Spam from email clients like Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, etc... from their inbox. While you should not have any spam complaints, they do happen. Once a spam complaint is recorded, Postmark will deactivate this address and will not let you reactivate it. 

In the email industry, spam complaints are a clear metric to determine abuse and poor sending practices. It’s important that we take these reports seriously to ensure the best delivery for all customers. If you feel a spam complaint has a reason for being reactivated, please contact Postmark support directly.

What can I do with spam complaint events?

• Instantly informed that a particular email has been explicitly marked as spam and you can initiate further action based on that event.
• Generate statistics that are specific to your application.
• Provide your users with an UI enabling them to see what happened with their email notifications.

Create a new webhook #

In your Postmark account — select a Server, Message Stream, and navigate to the Webhooks settings tab. Add a new webhook with your URL and toggle the Spam Complaint type. You can also use the API.

Using the API

Set Triggers.SpamComplaint.Enabled to true to enable this event type when you create or edit webhooks. Whichever method you choose, verify everything works as expected before real events start flowing.

Event data #

An example of the full JSON document that would be POSTed to your webhook URL is to the right. A brief description of some of the more interesting fields is below:

• Email — The email address of the recipient.
• Tag — Delivery tag that was used when the message was sent.
• BouncedAt — Timestamp of when complaint occurred (ISO 8601 format).
• Subject — Subject line of the email that was sent.
• Metadata — Custom metadata that was included in the email.

Testing events #

If you’re developing on your local machine or don’t have a public URL for your API, the cURL request example below sends a test webhook to your service. Replace <your-webhook-url>, run the command, and verify it accepts and processes the event as expected.