Changes to AOL FBL

In a blog post today, AOL announced they are changing the from address on their FBL emails from scomp@aol.net to fbl-no-reply at postmaster.aol.com. This change will take place on January 16th, 2017.
AOLlogoForBlog
While this may seem a minor change to announce so far in advance, it’s really not. Because AOL was the first FBL, there are many tool chains that have been kludged together to handle the messages. Many of these tool chains rely on “scomp” in the header to work.
This is as good a time as any to review your current FBL handling code. Are you handling FBL messages correctly? Is there anywhere in your code that does things based on scomp being in the header?
Actually, it’s a good time to take a step back and think about FBLs in general and what you should be doing with the mail. These aren’t just complaints, they are direct feedback from your recipients. Sure, they just have to hit a button, but it’s still feedback.
Do you listen to that feedback or just unsubscribe folks?
Do you pay attention to which campaigns, mailings and offers trigger higher levels of FBLs?
Do changes in FBL rates factor into your marketing strategy at all? Why not?
Do you even know what happens when a FBL email arrives at your sever? Are you sure?
All of these are useful questions to ask at any time. But now that some folks are having to touch the FBL code, maybe it’s a time to develop a strategy for FBL processing. Use that data to inform and improve your marketing.
 
 

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New FBL information

A couple new bits of information for folks interested in participating in feedback loops.
If you’re an ESP, you’ll want to sign up for the two new FBLs that were released this month. XS4ALL and Telenor are now offering complaint feeds to senders.
If you’re a mail recipient and want the ability to report spam, try the new browser/MUA plugins for reporting spam released by the French anti-spam grup Signal Spam
These browser plugins allow recipients to report spam directly from a button in the browser. Signal Spam reports:
The button is working for the biggest webmails around, such as yahoo!, SFR, gmail, outlook, AOL, laposte, free, and is downloadable for Chrome, Safari and Firefox with this links :
Chrome
Safari
Firefox
These plugins are currently in beta, but should be released by the end of 2016.
For those folks who use our ISP information page, I haven’t yet added Telenor and XS4ALL to the pages of available FBLs. Part of that is because we’re looking at options to improve data presentation and ease of maintenance. The perl script that magically generated the summary page from other pages was great, until it hid itself on some VM somewhere and can’t be found. There are other things we want to maintain as public resources, so we’re looking into options. (wikimedia was one of our early attempts… it didn’t do what we needed). Anyone have a public KB or wiki package they particularly like?

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Feedback loops

There are a lot of different perspectives on Feedback Loops (FBLs) and “this is spam” buttons across the email industry.
Some people think FBLs are the best thing since sliced bread and can’t figure out why more ISPs don’t offer them. These people use use the data to clean addresses off their lists, lower complaints and send better mail. They use the complaints as a data source to help them send mail their recipients want. Too many recipients opted out on a particular offer? Clearly there is a problem with the offer or the segmentation or something.
Other people, though, think the existence of “this is spam” buttons and FBLs is horrible.  They call people who click “this is spam” terrorists or anti-commerce-net-nazis. They want to be able to dispute every click of the button. They think that too many ISPs offer this is spam buttons and too many ESPs and network providers pay way to much attention to complaints. The argue ISPs should remove these buttons and stop paying attention to what recipients think.
Sadly, I’m not actually making up the terminology in the last paragraph. There really are who think that the problem isn’t with the mail that they’re sending but that the recipients can actually express an opinion about it and the ISPs listen to those opinions. “Terrorists” and “Nazis” are the least of the things they have called people who complain about their mail.
One of the senior engineers at Cloudmark recently posted an article talking about FBLs and “this is spam” buttons. I think it’s a useful article to read as it explains what value FBLs play in helping spam filters become more accurate.

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New AOL Postmaster Pages

AOL has updated their Postmaster pages with a new design and new resources for senders who are sending to AOL.  If you are sending to AOL, use the updated site to sign up for the feedback loop, request whitelisting, open a trouble ticket, or learn about the AOL error codes and bulk sending best practices.
AOL Postmaster Pages

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