FBL for your domains

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

From some time we started to provide such information using FBL technology ( Feedback Loop ).

What is FBL?

FBL is a standard for reporting spam complaints from an email service provider to the sender.
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The support of Mail.Ru of FBL technology essentially means that any sender of letters (for example, a web service) can receive from us in real time information that a particular user complained (clicked the “This is spam” button) to a specific letter that came from this service.

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

The format of an ARF letter consists of several parts:

• Text version. Intended to be displayed 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 additional information.
• The original letter to which complained, as an attachment.

Sample ARF report:

From: <abusedesk@example.com> Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2005 17:40:36 EDT Subject: FW: Earn money To: <abuse@example.net> 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: <somespammer@example.net> Original-Rcpt-To: <user@example.com> 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: <somespammer@example.net> 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: <Undisclosed Recipients> 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 you need FBL?

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

Often, senders of mailings do not think about a simple unsubscribe from their mailing without entering a password and logging into your personal account. This, plus the banal laziness of users, leads to the fact that clicking on the "Spam" button is synonymous with unsubscribing.

By processing FBL reports, you can automatically unsubscribe users from mailing lists, clearing their base, forming a constant audience of interested subscribers, reducing the load on their servers and mail providers.

In addition, by receiving reports, you can analyze the contents of the mailing, correct it to reduce the number of complaints and thus avoid blocking in the future.

By the way, for the analysis of statistics on letters in our Postmaster Mail.Ru service, 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, you must also enter into a special contract.

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

In RuNet, FBL technology was the first to use Mail.Ru Mail.

FBL Mail.Ru

At the moment, we provide a subscription to the FBL for your domains as part of the Postmaster.Mail.Ru service. To subscribe you need:

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

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

FBL is currently working in test mode, and we will be grateful for any errors found, comments and ideas.

Vasily Bespalov,
Project Manager Antispam Mail.Ru Mail.