Some people think FBLs are the best thing since sliced bread and can’t figure out why more ISPs don’t offer them. These people use use the data to clean addresses off their lists, lower complaints and send better mail. They use the complaints as a data source to help them send mail their recipients want. Too many recipients opted out on a particular offer? Clearly there is a problem with the offer or the segmentation or something.

Other people, though, think the existence of “this is spam” buttons and FBLs is horrible.  They call people who click “this is spam” terrorists or anti-commerce-net-nazis. They want to be able to dispute every click of the button. They think that too many ISPs offer this is spam buttons and too many ESPs and network providers pay way to much attention to complaints. The argue ISPs should remove these buttons and stop paying attention to what recipients think.

Sadly, I’m not actually making up the terminology in the last paragraph. There really are who think that the problem isn’t with the mail that they’re sending but that the recipients can actually express an opinion about it and the ISPs listen to those opinions. “Terrorists” and “Nazis” are the least of the things they have called people who complain about their mail.

One of the senior engineers at Cloudmark recently posted an article talking about FBLs and “this is spam” buttons. I think it’s a useful article to read as it explains what value FBLs play in helping spam filters become more accurate.

We have found over time that the most effective systems are those that learn to classify undesirable content based on feedback from users. The user is truly the best judge of what is and isn’t spam. The faster that consistent feedback becomes available, the sooner a filter can be re-trained to detect and respond to new attacks.

Spam filters are not there to stymie senders, their real job is to protect recipients. Faster adapting filters may seem like a bad thing, but they adapt in both directions. Send good mail that people want and it gets through. Send bad mail that people complain about and filters quickly adapt to block it.

Certainly, the “This is not spam” action – moving an email from the spam folder to the inbox, or clicking the “not spam” button in a web mail’s interface, is a strong positive reputational action. Some webmail providers use this data to decide which bulked senders deserve being let out of the penalty box – which should have their mail once again delivered to the inbox.

A client recently theorized that a great solution to their delivery problems would be to do this “en masse.” Sign up for hundreds or thousands of webmail accounts, send my mail to them, and click on the ”not spam” button for each of my own emails. That’ll greatly improve my sending reputation, right?

NO! ISPs have already thought of this. They watch for this. They’re really good at picking up on things like this. I know for a fact that Yahoo and Hotmail and AOL notice stuff like this, and I strongly suspect other webmail providers notice it as well.

What happens when Yahoo or Hotmail pick up on this type of unwanted activity? Well, if it’s at Yahoo, they’re likely to block all mail from you, 100%, forever. I’ve seen it happen more than once. Yahoo might even identify all of your netblocks, ones beyond the ones sending today’s mail or originating today’s activity. And good luck trying to convince them that you’re not a spammer – you have a better chance of winning the lottery two weeks in a row.

As for Hotmail – what would Hotmail do? Ask Boris Mizhen. Microsoft is currently suing him, alleging that he and/or his agents or associates engaged in this very practice.

Yahoo! offers a Complaint Feedback Loop service, free of charge, via this site operated by Return Path. To begin the process:

1. Determine your sending domain (the d= value in your DomainKeys or DKIM signature).
2. Determine your selector (the s= value in your DomainKeys or DKIM signature).
3. Create a dedicated email address to receive complaints, capable of handling a large volume of reports in the standard Abuse Reporting Format.

Additionally, Yahoo is now incorporating ReturnPath’s Sender Score Certified into their spam filtering process.

UPDATE: Those with existing Yahoo FBLs do not need to reapply, the current FBLs will continue as before. However, if you have an existing FBL and want to make changes to it, you will need to do the following:

If you had registered and activated domains during the beta phase of our Complaint Feedback Loop program last year and wish to manage these domains, we encourage you to create an account at:

http://feedbackloop.yahoo.net/

After creating and verifying your account via the online process, please complete our request form so we can link your account to your company’s existing record. The form can be found at:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/cfl_app.html

Once your account is linked, you will be able to make changes to your domains.

Note: When creating your account, please provide your corporate email address during the registration process.

That’s mostly there to protect you, by making sure that someone else can’t get feedback loop messages for your domain. And it’s not too difficult to do, as you should already have an abuse@ and postmaster@ alias set up, and have someone reading the abuse@ alias.

But maybe you’re using Google Apps to host your corporate email, and that’s the domain you need to use for your feedback loops. So you go to create abuse and postmaster users, but it won’t let you – you just get the error Username is reserved for email list only. Uhm, what?

Google want to police use of domains hosted on their service, so they automatically set up abuse and postmaster aliases for your domain, and any mail sent to them is handled by Google support staff. You may well be happy with Google snooping on your abuse role account, but you really need to be able to read the mail sent to it yourself too.

So what to do? Well, the way Google set things up they actually create invisible mailing lists for the two role accounts, and subscribe Google Support to the lists. In older versions of Google Apps you could make those mailing lists visible through the user interface by trying to create a new mailing list with the same name, then simply add yourself to the mailing list and be able to read your abuse@ email.

But Google broke that functionality in the latest version of the Google Apps control panel, when they renamed email lists to “groups”. If you try and create a new group with the email address abuse@ your domain you’ll get the error Email already exists in this domain, and no way to make that list visible.

So, what to do?

Well, there’s a workaround for now. If you go to Domain Settings you can select the “Current Version” of the control panel, rather than the “Next Generation” version. That gives you the old version of the control panel, where all this worked. Then you can go to User Accounts, create a new email list delivering to abuse@ and add one of your users to the mailing list. You can then set the control panel back to “Next Generation” and have access to the mailing lists via Service Settings → Email → Email Addresses.

Hopefully Google will fix this bug, but until they do here’s the step-by-step workaround:

1. Go to Domain Settings, select the Current Version of the control panel and hit Save Changes
2. Go to User Accounts and click Create email list
3. Enter “abuse” as the name of the list, and one of your users as the recipient, and press Add recipient
4. Do the same thing again to create your postmaster list
5. Go to Domain Settings, select the Next Generation of the control panel and hit Save Changes
6. Go to Service Settings → Email → Email Addresses and you’ll see the two mailing lists, and you’ll be able to add and remove recipients from those lists

And then you should have working abuse@ and postmaster@ aliases. Before you need to rely on them, test them by sending mail to them from somewhere other than your Google account.