When your emails get spammed
Surely each of us at least once had to mark messages that came in the mail as spam. It doesn't matter if these letters are annoying with a proposal to increase your hourly income or a legal newsletter to which you once subscribed yourself, clicking on the "spam" button is the simplest way to get rid of it.
For each letter marked by the user, the postal service receives a complaint, remembering the ip or the sender's address. Once the number of complaints reaches a critical level, the company providing mailing services may be recognized as a spammer, and its address is blacklisted or simply blocked. To avoid this, the sender needs to have a feedback channel with the subscriber and, based on his reaction, change the distribution policy. To solve this problem, we ( Unisender ) apply the Feedback Loop (FBL) technology, which we want to talk about in this article. The principle of FBL operation is to notify the sender when a complaint from a user arrives at his letter - a kind of quality control, quality control, allowing to evaluate the usefulness of mailing by the reaction of the users themselves.
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After the user clicks the spam button, the mail provider automatically compiles a report on the complaint. Most providers use the generally accepted Abuse Reporting Format (ARF) for this, containing the recipient's e-mail address, the original letter and the reason for determining it in spam. In addition to the direct complaint from the subscriber, it can be the presence of a virus in the mailing list or a banal spam filter. The sender of the list can access this information if it has an FBL agreement with it. As a rule, these are large services of legal mailings. Reports can be received in real time or in batches periodically or upon reaching a certain number of complaints.
A mailing service using FBL gains significant benefits. First, it is the ability to identify disinterested subscribers and adjust the mailing lists. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of users are lazy to unsubscribe from the mailing list, or simply do not know about this possibility, and services do not think about user friendliness and force the often forgotten password from a forgotten website to be entered often to unsubscribe from their mailing - as a result, the “ spam "becomes a synonym for failure for the user.
We have already written about simple rules that allow minimizing the spam filters “under the knife”, but they cannot protect against such a scenario 100%. Feedback through FBL will allow the sender to prevent blacklisting of the mail service. By analyzing the data of the reports, improving the material of mailings, and thereby reducing the number of complaints, the sender can avoid mistakes, in which the unsuccessful formulation of the letter sends it to spam.
FBL allows the addressee company to form a stable audience of regular readers, subscribers - to receive higher quality mailings, postal service - to reduce the load on the server and reduce the number of users dissatisfied with unwanted emails. Nevertheless, the service still has room to grow: it lacks the ability to determine why the user marked the letter as spam.
FBL is a rarely advertised and not very well-known service. There is a reason for this: as a rule, postal services provide it only to well-known and trusted companies. Thus, most subscribers get access to it through an intermediary. The largest service providing FBL services in the west is Return Path . Her services are not free and, although she can work with Russian companies, she has not yet provided a Russian-language interface.
Of the Russian Unisender services, so far one of the few who have FBL agreements with all the major mail providers - AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail / MSN / Live. Moreover, we constantly campaign for the creation of this functionality and domestic postal services (for example, we are negotiating on this issue with Yandex-Mail and Mail.ru) - they are not on this list, because they still do not consider the use of FBL challenge Over time, of course, this issue should be resolved - with the growth of the market of legal mailings and the emergence of competition, quality control will become a necessary part of polite communication with the user, and the task of postal services is to help in this. But for clients targeting international audiences (respectively, with email addresses of Hotmail, Google, etc.), we can provide this service now.
For each letter marked by the user, the postal service receives a complaint, remembering the ip or the sender's address. Once the number of complaints reaches a critical level, the company providing mailing services may be recognized as a spammer, and its address is blacklisted or simply blocked. To avoid this, the sender needs to have a feedback channel with the subscriber and, based on his reaction, change the distribution policy. To solve this problem, we ( Unisender ) apply the Feedback Loop (FBL) technology, which we want to talk about in this article. The principle of FBL operation is to notify the sender when a complaint from a user arrives at his letter - a kind of quality control, quality control, allowing to evaluate the usefulness of mailing by the reaction of the users themselves.
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FBL working principle
After the user clicks the spam button, the mail provider automatically compiles a report on the complaint. Most providers use the generally accepted Abuse Reporting Format (ARF) for this, containing the recipient's e-mail address, the original letter and the reason for determining it in spam. In addition to the direct complaint from the subscriber, it can be the presence of a virus in the mailing list or a banal spam filter. The sender of the list can access this information if it has an FBL agreement with it. As a rule, these are large services of legal mailings. Reports can be received in real time or in batches periodically or upon reaching a certain number of complaints.Why do I need Feedback Loop?
A mailing service using FBL gains significant benefits. First, it is the ability to identify disinterested subscribers and adjust the mailing lists. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of users are lazy to unsubscribe from the mailing list, or simply do not know about this possibility, and services do not think about user friendliness and force the often forgotten password from a forgotten website to be entered often to unsubscribe from their mailing - as a result, the “ spam "becomes a synonym for failure for the user.
We have already written about simple rules that allow minimizing the spam filters “under the knife”, but they cannot protect against such a scenario 100%. Feedback through FBL will allow the sender to prevent blacklisting of the mail service. By analyzing the data of the reports, improving the material of mailings, and thereby reducing the number of complaints, the sender can avoid mistakes, in which the unsuccessful formulation of the letter sends it to spam.
FBL allows the addressee company to form a stable audience of regular readers, subscribers - to receive higher quality mailings, postal service - to reduce the load on the server and reduce the number of users dissatisfied with unwanted emails. Nevertheless, the service still has room to grow: it lacks the ability to determine why the user marked the letter as spam.
FBL in Russia
FBL is a rarely advertised and not very well-known service. There is a reason for this: as a rule, postal services provide it only to well-known and trusted companies. Thus, most subscribers get access to it through an intermediary. The largest service providing FBL services in the west is Return Path . Her services are not free and, although she can work with Russian companies, she has not yet provided a Russian-language interface.
Of the Russian Unisender services, so far one of the few who have FBL agreements with all the major mail providers - AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail / MSN / Live. Moreover, we constantly campaign for the creation of this functionality and domestic postal services (for example, we are negotiating on this issue with Yandex-Mail and Mail.ru) - they are not on this list, because they still do not consider the use of FBL challenge Over time, of course, this issue should be resolved - with the growth of the market of legal mailings and the emergence of competition, quality control will become a necessary part of polite communication with the user, and the task of postal services is to help in this. But for clients targeting international audiences (respectively, with email addresses of Hotmail, Google, etc.), we can provide this service now.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/125758/
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