Email Feedback Loop (FBL)

What is FBL(Email Feedback Loop)

Usually when users do not want to receive any more mails from an email account they just click the “report spam button” available in their web mail or mail client. As a result of that a complaint will be raised against the ip from which this email is sent and the isp will start blocking this ip after the complaint rate increases a certain limit. So it is crucial to know the users who do not want to receive mails from us  so that we can remove them from the mailing list and mails will not be sent to these users again. A Email Feedback Loop is a mechanism whereby an ISP will let you know when one of its subscribers complains about your e-mail.

How to Sign up For Email Feedback Loop

To use Email Feedback Loop you should send a request for an ISP feedback loop either via email or through a web form. Most of the ips provide a web from to register their feedback loop program. The usual information you need to provide to sign up for a feedback loop are:

* IP addresses that you want to receive feedback loops for

* The list of domains you want to subscribe

* A valid abuse@ and/or postmaster@ email address on the domains you want to subscribe

* Your contact information: name, contact email and phone number

* The email address a feedback loop will be sent at

* Quantity of email messages sent daily (weekly, monthly) to the domain of the feedback look

* Type of email content you send

A confirmation email will be sent to the contact email address you specify. Once your request has been approved, Feedback Loop email will be sent to the email address listed in the “Feedback Loop Email” field.

How FBL Works

1. Sender sends a mail to the user

2. User complaints to his ISP about the message by hitting the report spam button

3. The sender  will be notified when a recipient complains about your email.

4. The sender will receive an email message saying something like “a spam complaint was registered for the IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx”.

Sender’s original email message will be attached to that notification email.

Advantages of Feedback Loops

Email Feedback Loop help you reveal unhappy subscribers, improve your email deliverability and decrease your spam complaint rate. This helps you to maintain a good reputation for the ips. Feedback loops allow you to check  deeply into your sign up process that adds user to their mailing list when one user signs up. Increased complaint rate can be caused by subscribers not realizing what they signed up for, subscribers not getting what they thought they signed up for, or a long delay between sign-up and the first mailing. So these feedback loops help the sending organization to improve the quality of their sign up process.

Different Feedback Loop Programs

Every ISP’s feedback loop is different, making the aggregate data sometimes challenging to manage. Some use a standardized format – the Abuse Reporting Format. Some send feedback in real time, others send in batches. Many send the entire offending message, others only provide the e-mail address – and still others send the body of the message but no address. For Yahoo only senders who sign their outbound emails with DomainKeys and/or DKIM are eligible to participate in their feedback loop program. AOL will only active the service after an ip ownership test.It verify that a particular domain has a right to receive abuse complaints for the ips in the submitted request. There are five possible tests to prove IP ownership. Passing any one of the five tests says “AOL, yourdomain.com has a right to receive abuse complaints on behalf of our IP.” Also different isps are providing options to modify the existing feedback loop. You may add more ips or remove existing ips through web forms. Also in any point if you do not want to use feedback loop service from an isp you may write to the postmaster department of corresponding isp for that.

Conclusion

This one-time action will help you keep a good email sender reputation and improve your email delivery rate into the recipient’s Inbox. So it is always better to have feedback loop.

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