You may have noticed a new unsubscribe link at the top of your campaigns in Gmail. Behind the scenes, they’re also adding a quasi-feedback loop to let ESPs like MailChimp know how many spam complaints our users are seeing. While I’m not sure if they planned it this way, I like to think these two changes complement each other.

The way I see it, spam complaints have a lot of power to tank your deliverability, whereas unsubs are fairly healthy. Healthy in the way that jogging to a table of free doughnuts is better for you than crawling on the floor, following a trail of gumdrops, and then finding yourself at the table of free doughnuts like, "Whoa!" What was I saying? Oh yes, unsubs. They’re a healthier way for your subscribers to disengage.

I did some quick research on the 4.6 billion sends to Gmail we’ve seen this year, so I’ll throw that in as we go over how these new Gmail features work.