fbl
As talked about previously, ISP feedback loops are in flux in 2023. Validity, who manages the backend FBL processes for a large number of mailbox providers via their “Universal Feedback Loop”, has indicated that they’re moving from a free to a paid model. Free access will provide aggregrated metrics via a dashboard, but no full feeds of raw complaints. Meaning, if you want to be able to directly log (or unsubscribe) all complaints, you or your ESP or CRM tool will need to pay Validity for that access. I pondered here, what of Abusix? An anti-spam/security software vendor founded in 2009, they had indicated that they were considering offering their own “FBL processing” service. And indeed, that is now taking shape. I reached out to Tobias Knecht and Steve Freegard from Abusix to ask them about this new service. They told me that they felt they already had appropriate infrastructure
It’s time for another entry in the DELIVTERMS dictionary! Today, let’s define JMRP. JMRP is the “Junk Mail Reporting Program,” the mechanism by which email sending platforms and internet service providers can receive complaints back whenever an Outlook.com (Microsoft OLC) user clicks the “report spam” button to tell Microsoft that they think a particular email message is spam. You might find some older documentation that refers to this as the “Junk Mail Reporting Partner Program” (JMRPP) – that’s an older name for the same thing. Overall, mailbox providers and internet service providers call these types of mechanisms “Feedback Loops.” Thus, the JMRP is the Microsoft Outlook.com ISP feedback loop. A sender must utilize a dedicated sending IP address to sign up for JMRP; the intent is for the owner of an IP address to get complaints back about mail sent from their own IP address. (Platform owners, whether or not
I realize that talking about ISP feedback loops can just lead to a lot of blank stares from folks. Not because they’re stupid, by any means. But because for the most part, FBLs are such a basic, foundational part of an email sending platform, and most of those platforms long ago “just dealt with it” — meaning dealt with the set up and management of feedback loops many years ago (almost 20 years, in some cases), that a lot of marketers haven’t ever been required to set up or manage feedback loops themselves. Indeed, some modern email sending or relay platforms just manage the feedback loop stuff for you, automatically, suppressing complainers and generating reporting. So some newer platform maintainers may not have ever even set up and managed ISP feedback loops.Question number one: If nobody really knows about or remembers this, and if new platforms perhaps don’t even bother
As noted recently, Validity plans to start charging for ISP feedback loop complaint feeds. Free users will get some sort of aggregate dashboard that is perhaps similar to what one sees in Google Postmaster Tools, but it sounds as though there will be no individual complaints fed, and no opportunity to log or unsubscribe complaints or complainers.If some number of sending platforms decide not to pay this fee, and thus stop receiving spam complaint feeds, this is likely to have an impact on the email ecosystem. How much of an impact? To understand that, we should start by identifying the potential beneficiaries of ISP feedback loop complaints:The end user. In most cases, a “report spam” complaint results in that end subscriber getting unsubscribed from a particular sender. The mail stops. Now, the mail will not stop, perhaps allowing the user to report spam again and again, possibly causing more negative
Email feedback loops have a long history as a component of the sending, receiving and handling of email messages en masse. I vaguely recall that AOL was the first entity to set up what we commonly think of as a feedback loop — with their now-common process to register your sending IP addresses with the ISP, and if anybody complains about your mail, the ISP will send you a report back with the full headers and source (with perhaps a bit of it redacted at the instruction of some lawyer) so that you can count, report on, and review these spam reports. Review of that data could identify bad senders, identify bad lists, and help stop mail to people who don’t want the mail. (Indeed, the Wayback Machine shows mention of AOL’s Feedback Loop all the way back in 2004.)As that feedback loop mechanism grew in popularity, various other ISPs
Starting on August 16th, Microsoft seems to have stopped sending feedback loop reports. Microsoft’s FBL is called the “JMRP” (Junk Mail Reporting Program) and multiple folks are indicating that the email feed of complaint reports that this entails seems to have dried up. Microsoft has been notified but I’ve not heard of any ETA for a fix at this time. I’ll be sure to update this post if/when I receive more information.[ H/T: LB Blair and others ]
Multiple folks have reported via multiple forums today (May 22nd) that Yahoo’s ISP Feedback Loop (called the “Complaint Feedback Loop/CFL”) may not be working properly at the moment. People are reporting either no volume at all for the past few days or greatly reduced volume of spam complaint reports. I am reliably informed that Yahoo is aware of the issue and is working on fixing things. I’ll update this post when I have more information.
Hey, Al! My company has sent approximately 200,000 email messages in the past month to Yahoo! Mail recipients, but we haven’t received even a single complaint back via our ISP Feedback Loop. Is that normal?No, that is not normal! If you’re sending mail en masse, you’re going to get some non-zero number of complaints back. Even if it’s all fantastically opt-in and there’s no chance of somebody getting an unwanted email message, Yahoo’s ISP Feedback Loop, which they call the Complaint Feedback Loop, is always going to faithfully report along any complaints it is given, and that always will include a low number of complaints from people who truly did sign up for the email message. (Keeping in mind that a complaint isn’t what kills your deliverability dead; it’s a high number or high percentage of complaints that does it.)Thus, I suspect something is broken. Probably something on this checklist:You’re not