AOL Feedback Loop Gets a Makeover

By J.D. Falk, Director of Product Management, Receiver Products
and Michelle Pelletier, Senior Director, Client Services

Four years ago, a small group of email technology experts - from AOL, Yahoo!, the open source community, and other places - got together to solve what seemed to be a simple problem: feedback loops, such as AOL's, were not standardized and often difficult to parse. The result was a draft standard called the Abuse Reporting Format, or ARF, which has been adopted by nearly every ISP that has created a feedback loop since then - including Comcast and other feedback loops hosted by Return Path. (It's called a "draft standard" because the document has not yet gone through the IETF's full standards process. Few changes are expected as that process continues.)

Once this specification was stable, AOL began to offer an ARF option for those feedback recipients who were ready for it. Being generally nice folks, however, they continued to offer the old format.
But now, AOL has announced on their postmaster blog that they will be offering Abuse Reporting Format (ARF) as the only format for Feedback Loop (FBL) reports. Beginning on September 2, 2008, AOL will remove all non-ARF FBLs. They will also convert all existing non-ARF FBLs to ARF. ...

Categories: Deliverability

Reminder: New CAN-SPAM Rules Take Effect on July 7

By Tom Bartel
Chief Privacy Officer

Have you updated your email systems to comply with the new CAN-SPAM rule provisions enacted by the FTC back in May? If not, you might need to put the Fourth of July cookout on hold. These rules are enforceable starting on July 7.

For a refresher on what is now required, see my previous post. You can also listen to a recording of our client-only live Q&A session with attorney Alan Chapell of Chapell & Associates. Of course that brings me to another point: if you haven't already, you really need to consult your legal counsel to get the details on what your specific situation requires. We aren't lawyers!
A few more resources for you ...

Categories: Deliverability

Influence the Future of Email Marketing

By Anita Absey
SVP, Sales & Marketing

Our good friends over at Forrester are fielding a survey for email marketing professionals aimed at getting a handle on how email is used in companies today. This is a great opportunity for you to have your voice heard - Forrester's research has a huge influence in the marketplace of ideas. Plus, taking the survey gives you access to the aggregate data. ...

Categories: Response

MAAWG's Latest Documents Improve Accuracy of Reputation Systems

By J.D. Falk
Director of Product Management, Receiver Products

The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), of which Return Path is a very active participant, met recently in Heidelberg, Germany. Among other exciting projects, they finished two new best practices documents which have been lauded in the press as a big step towards stopping botnet spam.

("Botnets" are networks of computers infected by viruses or other malicious software, invariably without the owner's permission or knowledge, which are used to engage in criminal activities like sending spam or attacking web servers.)

Neither document, however, is actually about botnets - that'll come from the next meeting, which has a botnet theme. Instead, both describe simple ways to improve classification of mail sources, so that reputation scoring may be applied more accurately and effectively. I'll explain this further towards the end.

Email Forwarding Best Practices, edited by two of our friends at Comcast , describes a problem which only affects a small percentage of users - but for those who are affected, it's a big problem. ...

Categories: Deliverability