It often takes overwhelming evidence to convince some senders that their mail is spam. I’ve talked before about some of my clients who insist that I just “forgot” I signed up for their mail. But these aren’t the only excuses I hear.

A sender that denies all feedback about their mailing program isn’t a very good sender, though. The best thing any sender can do when faced with information is to think about why a recipient might not want their mail.

I often describe my role as a translator between marketers and IT folks. I can translate technology to marketing and back again. One of my other major roles, though, is translating uncomfortable or unwelcome recipient feedback. Many marketing programs have been significantly improved because the program maintainers took a minute to look at the feedback and use it.

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

The only thing I could think of is the poor woman who’s been gone for a week on vacation and is selecting large swathes of her mailbox and hitting “this is spam.”

She then gets mailbombed by her ISP with confirmation messages.

She then selects all the confirmation messages and reports those as spam.

Repeat until something breaks or she collapses sobbing in the corner because she can’t get all the crap out of her mailbox!!!

Asking users to confirm each spam report, either by an email or adding a second popup box is extremely user unfriendly. Users will demand a “confirm all” button, and never read the confirmation anyway.

What business advantage is there to an ISP in offering a feedback loop? I’ve never really seen one.

It’s a good question. There’s a fair bit of work involved in offering, maintaining and supporting a feedback loop. What makes it worth it?

At a consumer ISP there’s some email sent to customers that’s easy for spam filters to recognize and handle correctly. On one end of the spectrum viruses, herbal pills spam and spam from botnets is easy to recognize and block, while on the other end individual one-to-one mail from regular correspondents is easy to recognize and deliver. Most ISPs handle the easy messages well, so their customers experience with their spam filtering will be dominated by the harder messages to handle in the grey areas between these two extremes.

Of the unwanted email that ends up in recipients mailboxes the hardest, by far, to filter out is “legitimate bulk mail” – mail that’s coming from legitimate companies that’s likely to be wanted by a big fraction of the recipients. Some recipients want to receive the mail, others don’t object to receiving it, while others consider it unwanted spam. As any particular mailing of this type will look just the same and come from the same source a typical spam filter will find it nearly impossible to make the right decisions for all recipients.

The This-Is-Spam button allows an ISP to handle this sort of mail on a per-user basis, by providing an easy way for the user to flag the message as unwanted in a uniform way. The ISP can use that information both to tune user-specific mail filtering and to send a feedback loop report to the bulk sender. The bulk sender can use that report to stop sending mail to that customer and, maybe more importantly, it allows the bulk senders to tune their processes so as to fix the problem of sending mail to recipients who don’t want it. It gives the senders a metric to measure their process changes against – a pretty good metric.

That reduces the amount of unwanted email seen in customer inboxes, especially the unwanted email that’s very hard to filter in other ways. That leads to a better customer experience, which leads to happier customers and less customer churn. Customer churn is expensive in many ways other than the obvious problem that each customer lost is a monthly payment lost. It also leads to increased marketing costs to bring in new customers to replace those that are lost, and significantly increased technical support costs as new customers are brought onto the network.

“Too much spam” is a very commonly given reason by customers who are changing from one ISP to another, so controlling the hard to manage spam in this way – both directly and indirectly by improving bulk senders practices – can have a significant benefit to the ISPs bottom line.

Gmail’s help pages say:

We don’t think you should be burdened with managing messages you don’t want to receive. We do our best to put messages in Spam when we’re pretty sure you won’t want or need them. But everyone has different preferences about the mail they want to see. You may not want to read any messages sent by a certain company or mailing list, while another Gmail user finds these same messages to be valuable.

To help solve this problem, we’re providing you with an unsubscribe tool for some messages. You’ll see the unsubscribe tool when you mark a message from particular types of mailing lists as spam. If the particular message is a misuse of a mailing list you like to receive, you can Report spam as usual. But if you never want to receive another message or newsletter from that list again, click Unsubscribe instead. We’ll send a request to the sender that your email address be removed from the list. It’s that simple!

This prompted a number of us to start testing Gmail to see if we could identify what Gmail was using in order to present the unsubscribe message to the end user. Many thanks to the folks who tested various things and reported back the results.

Conditions where the unsubscribe option is presented include

• The mail is authenticated
• The sender has a good reputation
• The email has a mailto: option in the List-Unsubscribe header
• The recipients marks the message as spam

This is a small step along the path to an ISP mediated unsubscribe button. As of yet, I don’t know if other ISPs will adopt this model. As well, I expect senders will not like this implementation as the ‘unsubscribe’ option is only presented if they user has marked the message as spam.

On the other hand, this could simply be Gmail’s attempt to implement a feedback loop without the overhead involved in actually managing a feedback loop.

For some reason, though, I continue to receive questions about the Verizon FBL. Based on the questions, the best I can extrapolate is that there is an ESP out there, somewhere, that states they have a Verizon FBL. It is possible, albeit unlikely, that they have a special agreement with Verizon. However, there is no generally available Verizon FBL.

If Verizon does make a FBL widely available, I will mention it here and update the ISP information page with the data. Until then, be very cautious with claims that there is a Verizon FBL.

Everyone can stop panicking now.

Yes, Cox did stop accepting new applications for their FBL. They were swamped and overwhelmed with applications and had quite a significant backlog. One of my clients got caught in this backlog. I applied for them back in mid-October and they were just approved last week.

In order to solve the backlog problem, they shut down new applications. They will be working through the current applications and when they’ve approved all the current ones, they will start accepting new ones. I expect that it may be a couple months before they’re accepting applications again.

No need to panic. No need to email lots of people at Cox. No need to contact their FBL provider. Remain calm.

If you were lucky enough to get an application in, they will be getting to it as soon as possible. You will receive an email when you are approved.

If you have already been approved, there will be no interruption in your FBL. You will continue to receive reports during the signup hiatus.

The URL for our new Feedback Loop enrollment page is here:

http://feedback.postmaster.rr.com/

If you are presently enrolled in our legacy Feedback Loop, you must still apply for enrollment in our new Feedback Loop. We will not be migrating existing enrollments.

Our legacy Feedback Loop will cease operations on April 30, 2009.