Yahoo FBL returns

This morning ReturnPath and Yahoo announced the new Yahoo FBL has gone live. Signups are being accepted at http://feedbackloop.yahoo.net/. Yahoo provides the following instructions:
Yahoo! offers a Complaint Feedback Loop service, free of charge, via this site operated by Return Path. To begin the process:

  1. Determine your sending domain (the d= value in your DomainKeys or DKIM signature).
  2. Determine your selector (the s= value in your DomainKeys or DKIM signature).
  3. Create a dedicated email address to receive complaints, capable of handling a large volume of reports in the standard Abuse Reporting Format.

Additionally, Yahoo is now incorporating ReturnPath’s Sender Score Certified into their spam filtering process.
UPDATE: Those with existing Yahoo FBLs do not need to reapply, the current FBLs will continue as before. However, if you have an existing FBL and want to make changes to it, you will need to do the following:

If you had registered and activated domains during the beta phase of our Complaint Feedback Loop program last year and wish to manage these domains, we encourage you to create an account at:
http://feedbackloop.yahoo.net/
After creating and verifying your account via the online process, please complete our request form so we can link your account to your company’s existing record. The form can be found at:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/cfl_app.html
Once your account is linked, you will be able to make changes to your domains.
Note: When creating your account, please provide your corporate email address during the registration process.

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Yahoo update

It has been quite a while since I have had the opportunity to share information about Yahoo here on the blog, but there is new information to share.
Yesterday, Mark Risher from Yahoo spent some time talking with people about all things spam over at Yahoo. Matt from EmailKarma posted the transcripts as well as some excerpts from the talk. The really interesting bit, for me, was confirmation that Yahoo will be bringing back their FBL in the next few weeks. I have been hearing rumors about the return of the FBL for a while now, and it seems the general timeline (fall-ish) is accurate.
Speaking of the feedback loop, there have also been rumors that Yahoo is not accepting any changes to existing feedback loops. This does not seem to be the case. According to an internal person, companies who are currently in the beta FBL program can make changes to the program by contacting the postmaster team.

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Breaking through the script

In handling day to day issues I use the ISP designated channels. This means I frequently get dragged into long conversations with people, probably outsourced to the far east, who can do nothing beyond send me a boilerplate.
This can be a frustrating experience when the issue you’re trying to deal with is not handled by the script. Generally, by the time someone has come to me for help, they are “off script” and I do need to actually talk to a human to get resolution.
With Hotmail, I’ve found that persistent repeating of very simple phrases will eventually get the issue kicked up to someone who can respond with something beyond another boilerplate. This can take days, but it is possible.
I’ve recently run into a Yahoo issue where I am trying to punch through the script, but have so far been unable to.
One of the services Word to the Wise offers is whitelisting. I collect info from customers, verify that what they’re doing will get them whitelisted at the ISPs that offer it, and then submit the information to the ISPs. Yahoo has recently moved to an online submission form for their whitelisting process, which is great for me. No more creating a giant document and then cutting and pasting the document into an email and then mailing it off.
The problem is, there seems to be a minor problem with the Yahoo Whitelisting submission form. When submitting an online application to Yahoo, they respond with a message that says “this application is not complete.”
I’ve been attempting to break through the script in order to find out what about the application is not complete. The webform has data checking, and you cannot submit a form while leaving any of the questions blank. Asking “what is wrong” when the application is kicked back has resulted in me having multiple copies of the whitelisting submission form.
It’s gotten so frustrating that I’ve escalated to personal contacts, but they can’t explain what’s not complete about the application as submitted online, either.
Has anyone had any success breaking through the Yahoo script? Has anyone managed to get IP addresses whitelisted through Yahoo using the online form?

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Google Apps – where's my abuse@

Most ISP feedback loops require you to demonstrate that you’re really responsible for your domain before they’ll start forwarding reports to you. The usual way that works is pretty similar to a closed-loop opt-in signup for a mailing list – the ISP sends an email with a link in it to the abuse@ and postmaster@ aliases for your domain, and you need to click the link in one or both of the emails to continue with the feedback loop signup process.
That’s mostly there to protect you, by making sure that someone else can’t get feedback loop messages for your domain. And it’s not too difficult to do, as you should already have an abuse@ and postmaster@ alias set up, and have someone reading the abuse@ alias.
But maybe you’re using Google Apps to host your corporate email, and that’s the domain you need to use for your feedback loops. So you go to create abuse and postmaster users, but it won’t let you – you just get the error Username is reserved for email list only. Uhm, what?
Google want to police use of domains hosted on their service, so they automatically set up abuse and postmaster aliases for your domain, and any mail sent to them is handled by Google support staff. You may well be happy with Google snooping on your abuse role account, but you really need to be able to read the mail sent to it yourself too.
So what to do? Well, the way Google set things up they actually create invisible mailing lists for the two role accounts, and subscribe Google Support to the lists. In older versions of Google Apps you could make those mailing lists visible through the user interface by trying to create a new mailing list with the same name, then simply add yourself to the mailing list and be able to read your abuse@ email.
But Google broke that functionality in the latest version of the Google Apps control panel, when they renamed email lists to “groups”. If you try and create a new group with the email address abuse@ your domain you’ll get the error Email already exists in this domain, and no way to make that list visible.
So, what to do?
Well, there’s a workaround for now. If you go to Domain Settings you can select the “Current Version” of the control panel, rather than the “Next Generation” version. That gives you the old version of the control panel, where all this worked. Then you can go to User Accounts, create a new email list delivering to abuse@ and add one of your users to the mailing list. You can then set the control panel back to “Next Generation” and have access to the mailing lists via Service Settings → Email → Email Addresses.
Hopefully Google will fix this bug, but until they do here’s the step-by-step workaround:

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