About Direct Complaints

If you've been directed to this page, it's because we received a direct complaint from a campaign recipient, email service provider, or anti-spam organization and your account has been warned or suspended. We know you want to get back to work, but anti-spam laws require that we warn or suspend accounts during the investigation of a direct complaint.

During the time that your account is suspended, you won't be able to send campaigns, but you can still log in, view your reports, and manage your audience.

In this article, you'll learn how to start resolving this issue.

What is a direct complaint?

Direct complaints are serious and may occur when a contact receives unwanted email and notifies us. They may have complained to Mailchimp's Compliance team, or to our hosting facility or a denylist (other providers may refer to it as "blacklist").

A direct complaint is different from an abuse complaint in that a campaign recipient, email service provider, or anti-spam organization has reached out to us directly. An abuse complaint is when someone clicks the spam button in their inbox.

Our Terms of Use require that subscribed contacts in your audience have opted in to receive emails from you. People who haven't given you permission are also more likely to report your email campaigns as spam, so it's important to get permission from each contact.

The Importance of Permission

Why did this happen?

To help protect your reputation, we closely monitor how your contacts interact with your campaigns.

When we see something that could hurt your reputation, like spam reports and complaints, we'll send you a notification about it. We want to make sure your emails reach their recipients and that these things don't impact your deliverability rate.

What should I do next?

If your account has been shut down as the result of a direct complaint, we'll send an email to the primary account contact that briefly explains the issue. It will ask you to log in to your account for more information on how to resolve the issue.

After you log into your account, carefully follow the steps provided to you. The more information you can give us, the quicker we can complete the account review.

A full review of the incident will begin once we have the information we need.