For about a year and a half, Laposte.net had already integrated the feedback loop of Signal Spam which allows the members of the association to receive information on the volumes of complaints per day and per IP address. The objective of the Signal Spam FBL is mainly to allow routers to have a view on the traffic passing through their IPs.
This time, and in parallel to the other one, Laposte.net proposes a feedback loop to identify complainants, a bit like what Hotmail, Yahoo! and AOL have been offering for years. Technically, Laposte.net is based on ReturnPath technologies to operate its Feedback Loop. We find a system close to what American ISPs like Comcast, Time Warner Cable and others can offer.
How does it work?
In practice, access to the Feedback Loop is after registration (to access the form it is here), relatively simple identification information is requested. The main information requested is the range of IP addresses for which complaint reports are to be received. A confirmation e-mail is then sent to an e-mail address linked to the reverse DNS of IP addresses in question.
Once the registration to the Feedback Loop is validated, the complaints are sent to the ARF formatwhich is the de facto standard in this area and should facilitate its implementation by most email routers. In the spam complaint return, you will be able to find your X-header fields and thus easily identify the complainant.
Why now?
Very good question! Laposte.net is the only French email operator to deploy an FBL with complainant identification, and this, several years after the American operators and after having already deployed the anonymous feedback loop of Signal Spam.
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If the background, the identified FBL are not always well accepted in the anti-spam industry. The main criticism is that they allow advertisers who play the game to bring more quality in their email traffic (by removing complainers from it), but paradoxically also help spammers to slip through the net. Still today (and this is not likely to change any time soon), the complaint rate is the main measurement point to decide if a campaign is well accepted or not by the recipients. In this case, senders with bad practices can therefore limit the volume of complaints they generate and thus more easily fall under the radar.
On the other hand, email operators have a strong objective to reduce the number of unwanted emails received by their users. The implementation of an identified feedback loop therefore offers a promise of reducing the number of these messages.
If we finally take the point of view of advertisers, this new FBL can only be a good thing. It will allow to reduce the number of low-engaged recipients and therefore to refine the targeting.
Practical information
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