AOL Feedback Loop Saves the Day
More than a year ago I signed up for the AOL Feedback Loop. This is a tool for network administrators to receive notification if any emails sent from your servers are reported as spam by AOL recipients.
Some of my clients run large, double-opt-in mailing lists. Frequently AOL members click on the ‘this is spam’ button to those emails. Probably they are trying to block emails from one specific person (which won’t work) and maybe sometimes they use it in an attempt to unsubscribe from the list (this doesn’t work either) instead of clicking on the simple link provided at the bottom of each message. (That does work.)
The service had never really been valuable before. AOL won’t tell you who marked the message as spam due to their member privacy policy.
Due to our member privacy policy we cannot include the email address that it was originally sent to.
This makes it impossible to determine what user to remove from your mailing list as they suggest you doing.
We suggest removing members from your list who have marked the mail as spam.
Therefore the service was never really useful to me… until this week. They do send you a copy of the message and I started receiving spam reports that were actually spam originating from my server!
Long story short, one of my clients had installed a “contact us” type PHP script. The script didn’t properly sanitize posted variables before use and the “to” field was overridden and BCC used to send out lots of spam.
I was able to identify the site on my server which contained the insecure script and remove the script. The attacks were stopped within about an hour of when they started. Via looking through the error logs of the site I can see about 100 attacks have been blocked per day preventing hundreds of thousands of spam messages from being delivered.
Had the feedback loop not been implemented I probably would not have known about the attacks until my server wound up on enough blacklists to effectively stop all mail delivery from my server.
Explore posts in the same categories: Computer Technology, Website Development
February 20th, 2006 at 3:29 pm
I recently found out about this, and tried it out. While it doesn’t say which email the user is subscribed to, in my case it has the username on my site they are using. So I can then delete them using the username.
February 20th, 2006 at 4:20 pm
Hi Tim,
Yes, in some cases I can tell by the username like you mentioned. However in many cases the reported spams are coming from a mailman mailing list running on my server. Due to the large number of emails mailman needs to spit out, I have it configured not to send unique messages to each person which would enable me to figure out the recipient.
Instead it batches out identical emails to each user so I’m unable to track back the reporting recipient. I could change mailman’s behavior to be able to uniquely identify the recipient, however that would take the server a much longer time to perform with each new message being delivered to the lists.
Thanks for the comment!
March 8th, 2006 at 5:58 pm
I wanted to raise a general complaint concerning AOL’s proposed e-mail tax. Although they claim that this only affects AOL’s corporate users, this is a narrow-minded view. It will affect everyone who uses the Internet because it opens the floodgates for others to follow suit on the same trend and destroys the concept of a “free and open Internet” that we’ve all learned to depend on.
March 8th, 2006 at 6:57 pm
Hi Scott,
I’m not sure the email tax will have any impact on the feedback loop. Or am I missing something?
March 8th, 2006 at 7:05 pm
A phone operator from AOL directed me to your site to place my comment.
March 8th, 2006 at 7:09 pm
Well that is strange… We don’t have anything to do with AOL. I highly doubt anyone from AOL reads this site. What specifically did they tell you to do?
March 8th, 2006 at 7:13 pm
He told me to search for AOL Feedback from http://www.aol.com and click on the link that says “AOL Feedback Loop Saves the Day”. I mentioned that it said timflight.com and didn’t seem to have any affiliation with AOL and he said that this site was created by someone else but was used to voice opinions to bring to AOL’s attention. Odd…. Apparently they have no idea what they’re doing (surprise - surprise)
March 8th, 2006 at 7:22 pm
Hehe…. That is pretty funny. Maybe they just didn’t want to hear your feedback. Well, unfortunately I doubt if AOL will read this… But thanks for the great story. That is pretty darn funny. Silly AOL.
March 30th, 2006 at 3:06 am
I also find the AOL feedback loop useful, but one thing I haven’t been able to sort out yet is how to get off of the loop, or cancel it, or change the email address.
Any ideas on how to change the subscription at all?
March 30th, 2006 at 8:15 am
You can change your subscription by contacting them either by email or phone. There isn’t a form on the website you can automatically do it by. You can find the contact information at http://postmaster.info.aol.com/contact/
May 6th, 2006 at 12:58 pm
JPRM I will like to get something to get rid of those stupid popups under my E Mail letters wich bother me a lot with their movements and now you have added more commercials in the TV Guide without any respect to your subcribers who paid for your service, frankly I am trying to change to another internet service with more respect for their clients. No wionder Consummer Reports consider you the worst of all the companies serving the internet, I look forward to: either you suppress those interfiering pops or I will move out of here.
May 6th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
{sigh} Here we go again. Jorge, I suggest if you have a complaint about AOL you contact AOL and voice your opinion. This site has nothing to do with AOL. This article is about an AOL tool called a “Feedback Loop” which has nothing to do with addressing AOL complaints. The AOL Feedback Loop is a tool used by other ISPs to help reduce spam. This article simply praises that tool.
May 18th, 2006 at 12:07 pm
An aol subscriber for about eight years, I hate aol and 9.0 for:
1. Three times as long to remove the Channel List and unlocking other functions following my ditching the welcome page,
2. Twice as many mouse clicks to select Left, Right or Center justify,
3. What I’m reading jumps when I release the mouse button after scrolling
4. There’s no way I can specify how long to keep my in-mail before ditching it to cyberspace and the box fills and turns off new mail.
5. The lopped-off sign-on tab, with half the thing missing,
6. The harder to read, junky, mile wide E-mail address list,
7. The huge, garish sign-on label with 9.0 in gigantic letters—as if we didn’t know.
There are about 500 other reasons I hate aol and 9.0, which can be summed up in three expressions: “Crumby programming” “clumsy formats” and “Insane designing.” AOL peaked at about 5.0 and since then you’ve run off the cliff, trying to be everything to every idiot on the planet.
Agree on some standard for a data transfer format, and quit dancing some step from the padded cells.
May 18th, 2006 at 12:12 pm
I give up.
May 18th, 2006 at 1:18 pm
I will like to get a a way to stop the stupid moving commercials that AOL is sneaking in the Email and the TV Channels List, WHY IN BLAZES THEY HAVE TO DO THAT, TO PROVOKE ONE TO CHANGE COMPANIES? aren’t them making enough money already? They have a good product and they are trying very hard to ruin it.
May 18th, 2006 at 3:35 pm
Apparently nobody likes to read.
May 30th, 2006 at 1:54 pm
Annoying popups? How about annoying ads–before every news item?!!
May 30th, 2006 at 3:15 pm
The hilarity of this all….
July 26th, 2006 at 8:50 am
Now that I’ve discovered this site, I know why AOL delivers much legitimate email to my spam folder!
This morning I went to AOL keyword Live Help and asked, “Why do you deliver some legitimate emails to my spam folder?” After asking how often this happens [about twice daily], whether the return address or domain name is in my “do not send list.” [no], whether the return address is in my address book [yes], he directed me to this site!
During that short exchange, he even suggested that I “clear” my mail controls do not send list!
AOL customer service is an oxymoron.
February 23rd, 2007 at 11:36 pm
The FBL system isn’t perfect, but it’s served us well. It’s become a good “indicator” of a user’s list management practices. If a certain threshold is reached, we start investigating.