feedback loops
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
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
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…