We’ve Changed the FBL Enrollment Process — Here’s Why

If you or your organization has recently applied for enrollment in IP-based feedback loops that we host (e.g., Comcast, Road Runner, etc.) you may have noticed that the confirmation email part of the enrollment process has changed. In this article …

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Categories: Explanation Return Path View Comments

Major Telecommunications Providers Cooperate to Stop Spam in Europe

Using the Abuse Reporting Format (ARF) and Return Path’s feedback report processing technology, ETIS members help each other find the spammers lurking within each others’ networks — and their customers’ networks, and their customers’ networks.

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Categories: Explanation Return Path View Comments

Reporting DKIM Failures with ARF

draft-ietf-marf-dkim-reporting creates a new ARF feedback type, simply “dkim”. It also introduces some new metadata fields, containing DKIM-related information….

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Categories: Explanation Standards View Comments

Abuse Reporting Format Demystified

As we discussed earlier, the standard Abuse Reporting Format (ARF) is used by nearly all complaint feedback loops. Today, let’s talk about what that format consists of.

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Categories: Explanation Standards View Comments

MAAWG Announces Best Practices for Feedback Loops

This week the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) released their newest Best Common Practices (BCP) document, focused on complaint feedback loops. Complaint Feedback Loops provide a mechanism for ISPs and other mailbox providers to funnel spam complaints from their customers back to the sender of the message. While they were originally conceived as tools just for ISPs to use to identify abuse coming from their servers and networks, most ISPs that offer them today allow email marketers, publishers, and other senders to enroll, and those traditional bulk senders have made it standard practice to do so.

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Categories: Best Practices Explanation View Comments

What’s an FBL?

In spite of the best efforts of anti-spam staff, end users — the account holders, recipients of email — still receive spam. And users want to complain about it, preferably to someone who’ll do something to make it stop. So, somewhere in the later 1990s, mailbox providers created an easy way to complain directly to them.

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Debating Standards While the Sun Shines

The IETF — the Internet Engineering Task Force — is, simply put, the standards body for the internet. As a body, they’ve been responsible for nearly every technical protocol that makes the internet work, from TCP/IP and SMTP to more recent developments like IPv6 and OAuth.

It was a beautiful week to be in Anaheim, even in the ring of hotels surrounding Disneyland — temperatures above 70 degrees F., clear blue Southern California skies, while more than a foot of snow landed on Denver. But the 1,200 attendees of the IETF’s 77th meeting spent most of their time inside fluorescent-lit meeting rooms, engaged in deep engineering debates.

IETF is kind of the opposite of TED, that famous gathering of fast-talking deep thinkers. It still involves some of the smartest people in the world, but …

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Categories: News Standards View Comments

AOL Feedback Loop Gets a Makeover

Four years ago, a small group of email technology experts – from AOL, Yahoo!, the open source community, and other places – got together to solve what seemed to be a simple problem: feedback loops, such as AOL’s, were not standardized and often difficult to parse. The result was a draft standard called the Abuse Reporting Format, or ARF, which has been adopted by nearly every ISP that has created a feedback loop since then – including Comcast and other feedback loops hosted by Return Path. (It’s called a “draft standard” because the document has not yet gone through the IETF’s full standards process. Few changes are expected as that process continues.)

Once this specification was stable, AOL began to offer an ARF option for those feedback recipients who were ready for it. Being generally nice folks, however, they continued to offer the old format.
But now, AOL has announced on their postmaster blog that they will be offering Abuse Reporting Format (ARF) as the only format for Feedback Loop (FBL) reports. Beginning on September 2, 2008, AOL will remove all non-ARF FBLs. They will also convert all existing non-ARF FBLs to ARF. …

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Categories: News View Comments