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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Reporting Spam on Mobile Devices

Return Path’s new study reveals that the massive increase in email readership on mobile devices corresponds with a decrease in use of webmail, particularly on weekends. If your focus is either spam detection or list management, that’s bad news.

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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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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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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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Email Best Practices Matter, No Matter Who You Are

If you haven’t followed Return Path through the length of our existence you may not know that our original business was an Email Change of Address service. This is a consumer service in which we facilitated re-connection of email relationships after an individual had moved to a new email service – the email equivalent of the United States Postal Service change of address form for when you move to a new house or apartment. It’s a pretty cool idea, which is why we recently sold it to Fresh Address, who will keep it running. You should give it a try.

In the process of running the service for more than eight years we acquired over 20 million customer records. In compliance with our privacy policy as part of the sale we sent a Change of Control Notice to these customers. The notice informed our customers of the new ownership, and gave them the opportunity to opt-out of the service before the data was sent to Fresh Address.

All of the email addresses were collected using the double opt-in method, however it had been quite a while since many of these customers had been sent email from Return Path. In many cases, it had been years. Yes, not routinely mailing our customers flies in the face of good email hygiene best practices – the practices we regularly recommend to our clients. We see the irony. But the Change of Control Notice is a promise we’d made to these customers in our privacy policy, and it’s required by the law in some jurisdictions, so we had to send the email.

So now what do we do? …

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Reputation Is No Longer Black and White

Comcast recently announced they are using Sender Score as a factor in determining if you are eligible to participate in their feedback loop program.

Basically, if you pass their threshold for “good” (Sender Score above 60), you’re in. If you appear below their threshold for “bad” (Sender Score below 30), you’re out. And if you are in-between (Sender Score between 30 and 60), they’ll factor in additional elements to determine your eligibility.

Reputation has evolved quite a bit in the receiver world. Not too long ago, the first reputation systems only gave binary answers. Most classified senders as bad (meaning they’d be blocked), or not bad (and thus not blocked) according to their own criteria. Others followed the model of …

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Categories: Explanation News Return Path 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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