FBL for your domains

After the launch of the Postmaster.Mail.Ru service , which allowed the senders of the newsletters to see the number of user complaints, we often get questions in the style of: “How can we see who complained and about what?”.

Since some time, we began to provide such information using the FBL technology ( Feedback Loop ).

What is FBL?

FBL is a standard for reporting spam complaints from an email service provider to an email sender.

Support of FBL technology by Mail.Ru mail essentially means that any sender of letters (for example, a web service) can receive real-time information from us that a particular user complained (clicked the "This is spam" button) to a specific letter that arrived from this service.

After clicking the "Spam" button, our service generates a report in a special format ARF ( Abuse Reporting Format ), which contains the original letter and email address of the user; the report may also contain additional meta information.

The ARF letter format consists of several parts:

• Text version. Designed for display to a user who can read this report. May contain some detailed information (what this report is about and why it was generated).
• Service information about this report (Content-Type: message / feedback-report). It contains information about the type of report (abuse - for reports on complaints about letters), and may also contain various kinds of additional information.
• The original complained email was in the form of an attachment.

Example ARF report:

  From: 
  Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2005 17:40:36 EDT
  Subject: FW: Earn money
  To: 
  MIME-Version: 1.0
  Content-Type: multipart/report; report-type=feedback-report;
       boundary=part1_13d.2e68ed54_boundary
  --part1_13d.2e68ed54_boundary
  Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
  Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
  This is an email abuse report for an email message received from IP
  10.67.41.167 on Thu, 8 Mar 2005 14:00:00 EDT. For more information
  about this format please see http://www.mipassoc.org/arf/.
  --part1_13d.2e68ed54_boundary
  Content-Type: message/feedback-report
  Feedback-Type: abuse
  User-Agent: SomeGenerator/1.0
  Version: 0.1
  Original-Mail-From: 
  Original-Rcpt-To: 
  Received-Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2005 14:00:00 EDT
  Source-IP: 10.67.41.167
  Authentication-Results: mail.example.com
                 smtp.mail=somespammer@example.com;
                 spf=fail
  Reported-Domain: example.net
  Reported-Uri: http://example.net/earn_money.html
  Reported-Uri: mailto:user@example.com
  Removal-Recipient: user@example.com
  --part1_13d.2e68ed54_boundary
  Content-Type: message/rfc822
  Content-Disposition: inline
  From: 
  Received: from mailserver.example.net (mailserver.example.net
       [10.67.41.167]) by example.com with ESMTP id M63d4137594e46;
       Thu, 8 Mar 2005 14:00:00 -0400
  To: 
  Subject: Earn money
  MIME-Version: 1.0
  Content-type: text/plain
  Message-ID: 8787KJKJ3K4J3K4J3K4J3.mail@example.net
  Date: Thu, 2 Sep 2004 12:31:03 -0500
  Spam Spam Spam
  Spam Spam Spam
  Spam Spam Spam
  Spam Spam Spam
  --part1_13d.2e68ed54_boundary--

Why do I need FBL?

Obviously, the main purpose of FBL is to receive feedback about the status of the customer base of the service and their loyalty.

Often, senders of newsletters do not think about a simple unsubscribing from their newsletter without entering a password and entering your personal account. This, plus the banal laziness of users, leads to the fact that clicking on the "Spam" button is a synonym for unsubscribing.

Processing FBL reports, you can automatically unsubscribe users from mailings, cleaning up your database, forming a constant audience of interested subscribers, reducing the load on your servers and on the servers of mail providers.

In addition, receiving reports, you can analyze the contents of the newsletter, adjust it to reduce the number of complaints and thereby avoid future blockages.

By the way, for the analysis of statistics on letters in our service Postmaster Mail.Ru there are a number of services that we previously announced on Habré ( http://habrahabr.ru/company/mailru/blog/138107/ ).

FBL in the world

FBL supports most of the world's major email providers, such as Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL. To use FBL, you usually need to specify and confirm an email address from the same domain (reports will be sent to it), and confirm the range of IP addresses from which you send mail. In the case of Hotmail, for example, it is still necessary to conclude a special contract.

Gmail does not provide FBL, but uses a special List-Unsubscribe header to unsubscribe a user from the newsletter. Using this header, you can create an analogue of FBL by monitoring on your side which letters were sent to whom.

On RuNet, FBL technology first began to use Mail.Ru Mail.

FBL at Mail.Ru

We currently provide FBL subscription for your domains as part of the Postmaster.Mail.Ru service. To subscribe you need:

1. Sign all emails using DKIM technology.
2. Add and confirm the domain in the service Postmaster.Mail.Ru
3. In the "Settings" menu of the Postmaster.Mail.Ru service, specify the email address for receiving FBL reports for your domain. At the moment, you can specify only email from the same domain.
4. Confirm the email address for receiving FBL by clicking on the special link in the confirmation letter.
5. Wait for your application to be verified.

After approval of the application, ARF reports will be sent to your address each time you click the Spam button. I want to note once again that DKIM is required for work, complaints about letters without DKIM or with the wrong DKIM will not be processed.

FBL is currently running in test mode, and we will be grateful for all the errors, comments and ideas found.

Vasily Bespalov,
Project Manager, Mail Anti-Spam Mail.Ru.