Feedback Loops

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.

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.

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?

New Feedback loop

There’s a new feedback loop at mail.ru. This is a DKIM based FBL (like Yahoo) and is designed primarily for ESPs. I am hearing there is an IP based FBL for ISPs in the works, but there isn’t a firm release date for that yet.
Senders and ESPs can signup for the new FBL at http://postmaster.mail.ru/. One caveat is that you must have a mail.ru account in order to get access to the stats page and there isn’t currently an English webmail page. I tried but couldn’t get online translators to work on the signup page.

Report Spam button

Cloudmark has an interesting discussion about the Report Spam button and how it’s used.

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.

Beware the TINS Army

When consulting with clients, I spend a lot of time trying to help them better understand the concept of sender reputation. Spam reports, feedback loops, and other data that comes from a collection of positive and negative reputational feedback about a company sending email.
Certainly, the “This is not spam” action – moving an email from the spam folder to the inbox, or clicking the “not spam” button in a web mail’s interface, is a strong positive reputational action. Some webmail providers use this data to decide which bulked senders deserve being let out of the penalty box – which should have their mail once again delivered to the inbox.
A client recently theorized that a great solution to their delivery problems would be to do this “en masse.” Sign up for hundreds or thousands of webmail accounts, send my mail to them, and click on the “not spam” button for each of my own emails. That’ll greatly improve my sending reputation, right?
NO! ISPs have already thought of this. They watch for this. They’re really good at picking up on things like this. I know for a fact that Yahoo and Hotmail and AOL notice stuff like this, and I strongly suspect other webmail providers notice it as well.
What happens when Yahoo or Hotmail pick up on this type of unwanted activity? Well, if it’s at Yahoo, they’re likely to block all mail from you, 100%, forever. I’ve seen it happen more than once. Yahoo might even identify all of your netblocks, ones beyond the ones sending today’s mail or originating today’s activity. And good luck trying to convince them that you’re not a spammer – you have a better chance of winning the lottery two weeks in a row.
As for Hotmail – what would Hotmail do? Ask Boris Mizhen. Microsoft is currently suing him, alleging that he and/or his agents or associates engaged in this very practice.

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:

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: