As of 6pm UTC the fbl.returnpath.com website is down. Return Path are aware of the issue and are working to fix it. I haven’t seen any estimated time to fix.
But, it’s not just you and they are aware.
EDIT: And 30 minutes after I posted this, it’s back. All fixed! Go and submit your FBL changes.
I wear a number of hats and have a lot of different email addresses. I like to keep the different email addresses separate from each other, “don’t cross the streams” as it were.
Things have been a little unsettled at Microsoft webmail properties over the last few months. A number of ESPs reported significantly increased deferrals from Microsoft properties starting sometime late in November. Others saw reduced open rates across their customer base starting in late October. More recently, people are noticing higher complaint rates as well as an increase in mail being dropped on the floor. Additionally, Return Path announced certification changes at the end of November lowering the Microsoft overall complaint rate to 0.2%, half of what is was previously.
Overall, sending mail to Microsoft is a challenge lately. This is all correlated with visible changes which may seem unrelated to deliverability, but actually are. What are the changes we know about?
The recent subscription bombs have started me thinking about how online organizations handle abuse, or don’t as the case may be. Deciding what to address is all about severity. More severe incidents are handled first. Triage is critical, there’s never really enough time or resources to investigate abuse.
What makes an event severe? The answer is more complicated that one might think. Some of the things that ISP folks look at while triaging incoming complaints include: