If you've seen all this talk about the recent much-improved profile of the Gmail unsubscribe button, and talk about a new Gmail (sort-of) FBL, you might be asking the question, why am I not able to track spam complaints from Gmail?

To understand why that is, we first have to undertstand how this type of spam complaint reporting works. Any time a "report spam" click generates a report back to you, the sender, this is called a Feedback Loop (FBL). Lots of ISPs and webmail providers offer them - AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, Comcast, and many others.

But, truth be told, Gmail does not offer this type of mechanism. They are choosing not to make this type of process available. That means that as it stands today, you're not going to receive any sort of reliable complaint feed back in response to your sends to Gmail subscribers.

As reported on by Laura Atkins over at her Word to the Wise blog, Gmail does have something they're calling an Feedback Loop (FBL). (We're MAAWG members, and we're considering participation.) But, what Gmail is offering isn't really what most folks think of as an FBL. They're offering some interesting and potentially useful data, for sure, but I think it is important to be accurate in terminology, to avoid confusion. What Gmail is offering is perhaps more akin to Microsoft's SNDS (Smart Network Data Services) service - which is more of a reputation dashboard / statistics portal.

Sometimes you'll see a very small number of Gmail "spam complaints" in ET tracking, in the complaints column. This typically happens when a Gmail user forwards their mail to Yahoo, then at Yahoo, they report the mail as spam. Yahoo's FBL works in a way where this report trickles back to us, but it tracks as a Gmail user complaining. This isn't related to any sort of Gmail FBL.

And finally, keep in mind that this has nothing to do with the new prominence of the Gmail "unsubscribe" button. A click on the "unsubscribe" link does not register a spam complaint. Click here for more information on this functionality.