I was scrolling through my industry feeds this morning when I saw a critical
update from Simon Bressier, the Head of Anti-Abuse and Deliverability at La Poste. If you send emails to French audiences, you need to pay attention to this immediately.
For a long time, the French provider Laposte.net has been relatively lenient compared to the giants like Google and Yahoo. But that era is officially ending.
Starting Monday, February 2nd, Laposte.net is reducing its tolerated complaint rate from 1% to 0.5%.
This is a massive shift. It effectively cuts your margin for error in half. If you have been coasting along with a complaint rate of 0.8% or 0.9%, thinking you were safe, you are about to hit a brick wall.
The New Standard: Why 0.5%?
To understand why this is happening, we have to look at the broader landscape. Back in 2024, Google and Yahoo set the industry standard by enforcing a strict 0.3% complaint rate threshold. They drew a line in the sand: if users report your emails as spam more than 3 times out of every 1,000 emails, you are done.
Laposte.net has traditionally allowed up to 1%. In the world of email deliverability, 1% is actually quite high. It meant you could annoy one out of every hundred people and still hit the inbox.
By moving to 0.5%, Simon Bressier and his team are aligning Laposte.net closer to these global standards. While 0.5% is still slightly more generous than Google’s 0.3%, it is a clear signal that the tolerance for "gray mail" and unwanted marketing is evaporating.
The announcement explicitly states this change is to "ensure even greater protection for our users against email abuse and fraud."
What Happens If You Hit the Limit?
If your complaint rate exceeds this new 0.5% threshold after February 2nd, you can expect significant deliverability issues. This usually manifests in two ways:
- The Spam Folder: Your emails will be automatically routed to the junk folder, meaning your open rates will plummet.
- Throttling and Blocking: In more severe cases, or if you persistently stay above the limit, your IP or domain could be blocked entirely.
I always tell customers that "complaints" are the strongest negative signal you can send to a mailbox provider. It is a user telling the platform, "I did not ask for this." When a provider like La Poste sees that signal spike, they protect their customer, not the sender.
How to Prepare for February 2nd
You have roughly two weeks to audit your sending practices. Here is my checklist for ensuring you don't get caught in the crossfire.
1. Check Your Authentication
If you are still sending email without fully aligned authentication, you are already behind. DMARC, SPF, and DKIM are non-negotiable. Not only do they verify your identity, but they are also often prerequisites for accessing feedback loops that tell you what your complaint rate actually is.
If you haven't looked at your DMARC reports lately, now is the time. At
Suped, we built our platform specifically to make this monitoring easy. You cannot fix what you cannot see, and knowing your authentication status is step one in protecting your reputation.
2. Make Unsubscribing Painless
The number one reason people click "Report Spam" is that they cannot find the unsubscribe button.
If you hide your unsubscribe link in a tiny gray font at the bottom of your footer, you are practically begging for a spam complaint. Put it at the top. Make it big. And ensure you are supporting List-Unsubscribe headers (RFC 8058), which allow one-click unsubscribes directly from the inbox interface.
It is better to lose a subscriber than to gain a complaint.
3. Segment Your French Audience
If you have a global list, isolate your subscribers with `@laposte` addresses. Look at their engagement metrics specifically.
Are they opening your emails? If they haven't opened an email in the last 90 days, stop mailing them immediately. Inactive users are the most likely to complain when you suddenly show up in their inbox again.
To monitor your standing with Laposte specifically, you should be using their dedicated postmaster tools if you aren't already. You can find their official guidelines and tools on the
Laposte.net Postmaster site. It’s a vital resource for understanding exactly how they view your traffic.
Furthermore, keep an eye on the broader industry guidelines. The benchmarks set by
Google's Email Sender Guidelines are effectively the "north star" for the industry. Even though Laposte is "only" moving to 0.5%, aiming for Google's 0.3% (or lower) is the safest long-term strategy.
Conclusion
The email ecosystem is tightening. The days of "spray and pray" marketing are long gone, and even regional providers like Laposte.net are closing the gaps.
This change to 0.5% is a good thing for the ecosystem. It forces senders to be more respectful of user attention. But it also means that as a sender, you have to be vigilant.
