Yahoo and their mail filters..

Ray Corbin rcorbin at traffiq.com
Fri Feb 27 13:34:36 UTC 2009


I'm quite aware of what comes from AOL's feedback loops, I used it for years when I was an email administrator for a large shared webhosting company processing ~2.5million outbound emails per day. I remember getting thousand reports per day. You can automate the process and that is why they use a standard format (Parse the message and run reports on who is getting spam complaints etc etc). If you are sending them X emails per day you can expect at least 0.3% or so to be marked as spam (including forwarders). I cant imagine you receiving 'thousands' of complaints like the one you are referring to...and if you are then you are sending them a larger volume then 100,000 emails per day (non-forwarded). If the feedback loop becomes more of a burden then a helpful notification tool unsubscribe. 

-r
________________________________________
From: Jo Rhett [jrhett at netconsonance.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2009 11:26 PM
To: Ray Corbin
Cc: Richey; nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: Yahoo and their mail filters..

On Feb 25, 2009, at 8:14 AM, Ray Corbin wrote:
> It depends on your environment. I've seen where it is helpful and
> where it is overwhelming. If you are a smaller company and want to
> know why you keep getting blocked then those should help. If you are
> a larger company and get a several hundred a day, but you send 100k
> emails to AOL then it is not as big of a deal. If you are a shared
> hosting provider and you get a lot of them you should look into what
> is being sent to AOL, such as forwarded spam from customers 'auto
> forwards' (isolate the auto forwards to a separate IP address and
> simply don't sign up for the FBL for it).... If you have a good
> setup where only customer-originated email is being sent through the
> IP's you have a FBL on, then it is useful and you shouldn't get as
> many complaints.


Ray, you don't get it.   What comes from AOL is literally every step
in a mother-daughter conversion.  You get to read the entire thread.
Loving chat, mother and daughter back and forth.  But one of them is
hitting SPAM on the e-mail *AFTER* replying to it and writing a nice
letter back.

This is abuse of the abuse department.  This isn't spam.  Reading
through ~3k of these not-spams every day doesn't help us solve any
actual abuse problems.

Feedback loops will not be useful until the providers of the feedback
loops accept reports about use of the spam reporting tools, and are
willing to go fix their user behavior.

--
Jo Rhett
Net Consonance : consonant endings by net philanthropy, open source
and other randomness






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