fbls
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
History Return Path was a major driver for the establishment of Feedback Loops (FBLs) back in the mid to late 2000s. They worked with a number of ISPs to help them set up FBLs and managed the signup and validation step for them. In return for providing this service to senders and receivers, they used this data as part of their certification process and their deliverability consulting. Return Path had a strong corporate ethos of improving the overall email ecosystem that originated from the CEO and permeated through the whole organization. In 2019 Validity acquired Return Path and within two months closed two offices and laid off more than 170 employees, many who are industry leaders and long time colleagues. In 2020 Validity acquired 250OK, one of their major competitors. Over the next year they then ended long term agreements with ESP partners, sued competitors and significantly raised prices for
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
A friend asked recently why they’re not receiving feedback loop complaint data back from Gmail subscribers. After all, she pointed out, Gmail does indeed have a Feedback Loop, does it not? What’s up with that?If you’re lucky, your sending platform is already configured to ingest and utilize data from ISP Feedback Loops (and most are). If that’s the case, you’re likely seeing complaints logged (and complainers unsubscribed) as a result of “this is spam” reports from various MBPs (mailbox providers) and ISPs (internet service providers). Yahoo, Microsoft and Comcast are perhaps the largest providers that offer these complaint feedback loops, and if you head over to Validity’s “Feedback Loop Service” website, you can see the whole list of 20+ ISPs and MBPs that participate in a Validity-managed “universal” feedback loop service. If you check that list on the Validity website, you’ll notice that there are three mailbox providers missing: Microsoft, Yahoo
An email feedback loop (aka ISP feedback loop or complaint feedback loop) is a spam reporting mechanism implement by an internet service provider (ISP) or mailbox provider (MBP) that allows spam complaints to flow back to the sender or sender’s email platform. Those forwarded “report spam” notifications allow the sender or sending platform to unsubscribe those who complain and also to provide sender feedback to understand which clients, lists or campaigns are causing the highest number or percentage of spam complaints.ISPs and MBPs already collect and correlate spam complaint data for their own uses. When you click the “report spam” button in Gmail, or Outlook.com, Yahoo, or elsewhere, those services capture and log your complaint, to feed into their internal spam filtering systems, to generate reputation-related metrics about the sender. Senders who generate more spam complaints are more likely to find themselves blocked, or to find their mail relegated to the spam…
Yahoo (as far as Yahoo Mail is concerned) was once called Yahoo, then it absorbed AOL and became Oath, then Verizon Media, and now it is just called Yahoo again. Throughout this time there has been some form of ISP feedback loop — you know, that thing that sends complaint reports back to the sender or sender’s ESP platform when a Yahoo user clicks the “report spam” button. But the URL and process to sign up for the Yahoo CFL or FBL has changed over the years, and it’s easy to stumble across outdated guidance when Googling. So, here’s my try at providing updated guidance.A note on terminology: Yahoo calls this spam reporting process a CFL (Complaint Feedback Loop). I and most others call it an ISP (Internet Service Provider) FBL (Feedback Loop). I consider the terms CFL and FBL to be interchangeable in this context.What is it? The Yahoo…
If you monitor ISP feedback loop complaints, you may have noticed that the level of spam complaints received was greatly reduced over the weekend, as it appears that the Validity-run Universal FBL system seems to have stopped sending feedback loop complaint reports at some point on Saturday.Validity’s Universal Feedback Loop (FBL) is a system that handles ISP feedback loop complaint processing and forwarding for more than two dozen mailbox providers.I’m assuming that this likely afftected all of the FBLs managed by Validity, which includes: BlueTie, Comcast, COX, Fastmail, Italia Online, LiberoMail, Virgilio, Laposte.net, Liberty Global, UnityMedia, UPC, Locaweb, Mail.ru, OpenSRS, Rackspace, Seznam.cz, SilverSky, Swisscom, Synacor, TIM, Telenet, Telenor, Telstra, Terra, UOL, Virgin Media, XS4ALL, Yandex, and Ziggo.Validity appears to be in the process of restoring service as of Monday morning, March 21st and complaints appear to be flowing again. Spam reports could show a spike (temporary increase in volume) as…