Hotmail complaint

"complaint" emails from Hotmail

The mailbox for support@ilovefreegle.org receives about 50 emails per day which are a forward of an email sent by Freegle Direct with the new subject "complaint about message from 46.23.73.54".

Regrettably Hotmail do not provide any information as to why an email was forwarded as a "complaint".

The assumption of the Freegle Support team is that for some reason the email(s) will have ended up in the members "junk" folder.

This could be because the member marked the email as "junk" but it is more likely that it was done by some set of rules which will be a combination of general rules and specific rules for that Hotmail address.

The disadvantages of these emails ending up in the trash folder include:

• the member being unable to find Freegle emails
• the member thinks that Freegle emails are spam
• Hotmail applying the "junk rule" to other members

What is the Support Team is doing with these emails?

The Team will log the "complaint" emails that it receives, recording

• the members email address
• the Freegle group
• the kind of email sent
• when the email was sent, and
• when Hotmail sent out the "complaint"

If there is only a single email/block of emails it will be assumed this was a one off and take no further action.

If there continues to be "complaint" emails over a period of time, the Team will write to the owner(s) involved and suggest they contact the member to offer advice.

• Most of the Freegle email include an email address to turn mail/events off. Where that can be extracted, it will be included in the email to the group owners.

If "complaints" are continued to be received after a number of days, a second message will be sent to the group owners. Hopefully the group owners together with the members can solve what is causing the "complaints" and stop them.

However, if the Support mailbox continues to receive "complaints" over a longer period of time, the assumption will be that the user would rather not receive emails/ events and the Team will turn them off.

• The user and group owner(s) will be informed that this has been done.

What can the group owner do?

Write to the member -

• encourage the member to mark the emails as "not junk"
• remind the member about the 'turn these off' information at the bottom of the emails
• possibly offer to turn emails/events off for the user. (Support have a tool to do this if the owner/member request this)

Keep a track of this as it may explain why a member is not replying to other members.

Example emails to send to members

This section is still to be done - sorry!