Your Email Resource.
Deliverability
Articles and guides relating in delivering emails to ISP’s and bypassing spam filters.
AOL feed back loop and whitelist applications offline
Jun 5th
Aol have today announced that their feedback loop and whitelist applications are offline whilst they resolve technical issues with them.
AOL said: -
We are currently experiencing technical issues with our feedback loop system. You will be unable to submit WL and FBL requests while we resolve these issues. Thank you for your patience.
Email Manual will post again when applications are available again.
Update: Now Resolved, see http://www.emailmanual.co.uk/?p=130
Yahoo! Spamhaus PBL issue resolved.
Jun 5th
With regard to our last post on delivery issues to yahoo, yahoo have today announced they have resolved the issue with delivery that was effecting some bulk senders.
Yahoo today released the following statement: -
We have rolled out a patch this morning that addresses the spurious Spamhaus blocks described in our prior post. We are confident that this latest push resolves the problem. We are still in the process of making sure all our MTAs received the update, but for the most part, the issue should no longer be prevalent (as of 10am PDT).
We certainly appreciate your patience during the past few days. If you encounter further issues, please free to let us know us via http://postmaster.yahoo.com (click on the “Contact Us” tab).
Regards,The Yahoo! Mail Postmaster Team
Click here To see our Original post on the Yahoo delivery issues
Delivery to Yahoo! over the past few days.
May 29th
Over the past few days Email Manual has received a couple of reports that delivery attempts to yahoo email accounts have resulted in bounce messages being returned by Yahoo quoting that the recipient was on the spamhaus PBL blocklist.
Upon investigation, Email Manual has found a post on the yahoo postmaster site with the following information:-
some senders are seeing intermittent IP blocks when sending to Yahoo! Mail, with the SMTP error message from us citing that the block was due to a Spamhaus listing — e.g., “553 5.7.1 [BL21] Connections not accepted from IP addresses on Spamhaus PBL.” (See our full list of SMTP error messages at http://postmaster.yahoo.com/errors/ .)
If your IPs are currently not listed on any Spamhaus blocklist but you are seeing this error, please be assured that we are looking into the matter.
Whilst this doesn’t appear to affect all senders or even the affected senders all of the time Yahoo are working on this error. This may result in higher than usual bounce rates on campaigns going to yahoo based addresses and this should be taken into consideration when reflecting on your campaign reports.
Email Manual will post again when the issue has been resolved and confirmed by Yahoo.
Update 05/06/09 – Yahoo claim pbl issue resolved.
What are feedback loops (fbl’s) and how can they help my deliverability?
May 22nd
Feedback loops are schemes operated by ISP’s for email marketers, ESP’s and other organisations that send large amounts of email to optionally sign up for.
Typically to sign up the person or organisation applying for the feedback loop will need to prove that they are responsible for the mail being sent from the IP addresses or domains on which the feedback loop is being setup on so be prepared to fax or send documentation and to be able to receive email on your domains abuse address.
Once verified and the application is accepted by the ISP the ISP will then start emailing an email address defined within the application each time one of your emails is reported as spam by the subscriber by clicking the “this is spam”.
The email sent to this address will be an ARF message, abuse report format. This is an email identifying itself as an ARF message with an attachment of the original message that was sent to the complainant. The receiving mail server should pass this to either a human helpdesk if your volume is low to be unsubscribed from the list or alterntively be passed to a processing application if you send large volumes of email.
This processing application will read the ARF message and the email attached within it, identify either through the to email address or the headers in the message which subscriber is complaining and unsubscribe them from the lists automatically.
So how does this help me?
Although it may seem like a bit of a waste unsubscribing users who complain once, in the long term it will pay dividends. By unsubscribing users who complain once you are reducing the likelihood of them complaining again, this means your overall complaint rate per IP or domain is kept low which is the key metric that ISP’s use to choose whether or not to deliver your messages. By keeping your complaint rate low from your messages to ISP’s which have feedback loops they are much more likely to allow your messages straight through to the inbox ensuring you continue to get your emails to the subscribers who actually want to receive them.
In addition, some ISP’s, after you have established a good record on their feedback loop, will actually allow you to apply for a whitelist which allows you to skip some if not all of the spam filtering that they use. AOL for instance is one ISP which operates a whitelist scheme in addition to a feedback loop.
For a full list of feedback loops and information on how to sign up, click here.
If you use an ESP to deliver your campaigns on your behalf, they should already have these feedback loops in place. Ask them and if not see if these can be implemented on your behalf.
Cox Feedback loop suspended.
May 20th
Cox communications a very large US based ISP have recently suspended their feedback loop.
A feedback loop is a way of an ESP or marketing department to know how many spam complaints they are getting from subscribers and automatically unsubscribe them from their lists to ensure that their spam complaint percentage remains low to ensure good future deliverability to subscribers who do wish to continue to receive their mailings.
The feedback loop website at http://fbl.cox.net now says “Thank you for your interest in the Cox Feedback Loop Service. However, at the present time, we are no longer accepting applications for new feedback loops. Note that this is a temporary change, and we do plan to offer new signups again in the near future, but currently a specific date is not known. Please check back here periodically for updates.”
There are rumours around the internet that applications for the feedback loop service are still being approved but months after the applications have been made. This would indicate that cox have been swamped by the shear amount of applications being made and they have closed their service to be able to clear the backlog.
If you have applied and not yet received your approval email, don’t panic the chances are your application will still be approved. If you have not yet applied, Email Manual will post again to let you know when the service has been resumed and applications are being accepted.
