As the volume of unwanted email has grown network operators have begun to exchange feedback among themselves and other parties. This feedback takes the form of complaints about spam, unsubscription requests, reports of email-borne viruses and other feedback.

ARF is a machine-readable MIME format for feedback reports intended to allow easy automated handling of reports by recipients.

Who is using ARF?

AOL and Outblaze have ARF-based feedback loops in beta.

Several ISPs are using arffilter or Abacus to handle ARF based reports. ARF is intended to be usable by standard MUAs, so some ISPs are handling ARF reports without any additional automation.

Documentation

Specification

• Current Draft: draft-shafranovich-feedback-report-07
• Authoritative text format
• IETF Status
• Document repository for previous versions

Commentary

• Annotated Sample Report

Discussion

Public discussion of the draft, implementation and interoperability takes place on the abuse-feedback-report mailing list.

• Subscribe to the list
• Mailing list archives

Software and Tools

• Tools for report senders
• Tools for report recipients
• Tools for developers - including sample reports, sample code and validators.