Word to the Wise » arf

Abuse Reporting Format

steve — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 20:58:25 +0000

J.D. has a great post digging into ARF, the abuse reporting format used by most feedback loops.

If you’re interested in following along, you might find this annotated example ARF report handy.

Y! and ARF

laura — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:41:28 +0000

Someone twittered me a question about Y! and their ARF reports. Apparently the ARF header is not including AM/PM which is causing problems for some people. Yahoo is aware of the issue and looking into it.

On a housekeeping note, sorry for the lack of postings this week. I’m still recoving from the trip and while I have a lot of things I want to talk about (including responding to the great comments on transactional email) I am swamped with catching up.

Updates on upcoming AOL FBL changes

laura — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:02:24 +0000

Annalivia posted more information over on the AOL Postmaster blog about the upcoming conversion of the AOL FBL to ARF only. Specifically, she provides instructions for how to read the FBL emails in different email clients.

ARF can be read in most major email clients with a little human intervention. The content of the header will be the same as the original format, in that the same redactions will be present. In the event that the recipient information is in the body of the email such as in a footer that says, for example, “recipient@aol.com is subscribed to this mailing list”, we will not redact that, and it will be contained in its original format in the human-readable attachment. If the recipient information is in an X-header, it can be accessed by setting the mail reading software being used to show headers, or by viewing the source of the ARF report.

AOL converting all FBLs to ARF

laura — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:55:46 +0000

AOL announced today that they are phasing out non-ARF feedback loops. As of September 2, 2008, no new non-ARF feedback loops will be created and all existing non-ARF feedback loops will be converted to ARF.

What is ARF?

ARF stands for Abuse Reporting Format. It is a standardized format intended to make processing of automated abuse reports (or feedback loop reports) easier. Word to the Wise has published tools to help recipients process ARF formatted reports and help developers create tools to handle ARF formatted reports. Abacus also supports ARF format out of the box.