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Audience Development Strategy

Email Marketing Tips: 10 Email Feedback Loop Lists

Mitigate spam complaints by finding out who’s putting you in the junkbox

An email feedback loop (FBL) is a service that many ISPs will provide to companies who send bulk mailings. On their end, it’s beneficial because it identifies pro-active companies and reduces the amount of spam sent to their users.

Whenever someone hits the “junk” button,

Stay in the email feedback loop and increase email delivery rates by finding out who’s putting you in the junkbox

An email feedback loop (FBL) is a service that many ISPs will provide to companies who send bulk mailings. On their end, it’s beneficial because it identifies pro-active companies and reduces the amount of spam sent to their users.

Whenever someone hits the “junk” button, they’re basically sending a complaint. Too many of these complaints will blacklist you from certain ISPs.

On your end, subscribing to feedback loop is very beneficial because the #1 reason for poor deliverability is spam complaints. By subscribing to an email feedback loop, you will know who is marking you as such so that you can remove them from your list and get your domain white listed with the top ISPs.

Many email service providers provide this service, but you may need to inquire. If they don’t, you can manually subscribe to these loops below, which will send you an email every time someone “complains” so that you can remove them from your list.

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What you’ll need in order to register for email feedback loops:

  • Access to accounts on your domain: abuse@ or postmaster@
  • IP addresses that you want to receive feedback loop emails for

Email Feedback Loop Forms you can fill out online

AOL Feedback Loop This page will give you access to the email feedback loop form. Read more about their application information, amongst other requirements and info which is all very important too.

Comcast Feedback Loop – A very simple form from Comcast.net that includes an informative “terms of service” agreement and privacy policy.

Cox Feedback Loop – Another quick form, provided by ReturnPath.

Bluetie Feedback Loop – BlueTie offers a feedback loop service, operated by Return Path, free of charge, to parties sending large amounts of mail to BlueTie members.

MSN/Live Feedback Loop – This Junk Email Reporting Program (JMRPP) encourages large senders to remove unwanted recipients from their email list. Click to read instructions on how to get accepted into the program.

United Online Feedback Loop – This lengthy application form also acts as a white list request. You may need to consult your Email Service Provider or IT team to get the information needed for this form.

Time Warner Cable Feedback Loop – A short application that will forward any mail reported as spam originating from the associated IP addresses back to the listed email address.

USA.net Feedback Loop – Another simple form that also gives you access to existing feedback loops, also run by ReturnPath.

Yahoo! Feedback Loop Form – Yahoo! offers a Complaint Feedback Loop service, free of charge, but you need to log in first.

Rackspace Feedback Loop – Simple form, run by ReturnPath.

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Email Feedback Loop Forms you can fill out through email

Common requirements for application:

  • your IP range
  • your domains
  • your network’s contact information: name, contact e-mail and phone
  • the e-mail to which the FBL will be sent

Charter Feedback Loop – (unblock@charter.net) Charter doesn’t have an official feedback loop, but they do have very strict spam policies. If your message is flagged as spam, you’ll get a notification automatically with a “550 [MESSAGE ID] Message identified as SPAM” message. From there, you can re-send (not forward) the original message with your plea to be unblocked to unblock@charter.net.

Earthlink Feedback Loop – (fblrequest@abuse.earthlink.net) Use the information list above to determine what to send to this email address.

Excite Feedback Loop: (fb-loop@bluetie.com and emailadmin@cs.excite.com) Use both of these email addresses, because as of June 2008, Excite moved over to BlueTie. Use the information list above to determine what information to send to these email addresses.

Gmail Feedback Loop – Just as a note, Gmail doesn’t accept white listing requests nor do they provide feedback loops. Last year they did enact a type of feedback loop, but it’s only available to your email service provider. They use contact lists plus extensive filters to determine what gets delivered to an inbox. They do have a bulk sender contact form however, if you feel that some of your messages are incorrectly marked as spam.

Verizon Feedback Loop – Verizon doesn’t have a feedback loop, but they do offer a whitelist form.

In order to increase delivery rates, make sure to encourage your users to add your email address to their address book when you send them their first email.

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Originally published in 2008 and is updated frequently.

By Amanda MacArthur

Research Director & Managing Editor

Amanda is responsible for all the articles you read on the Mequoda Daily portal and every email newsletter delivered to your inbox from us. She is also our in-house social media expert and would love to chat with you over on @Mequoda. She has worked with Mequoda for almost a decade, helping to evolve the Mequoda Method through research, testing and developing new best practices in digital publishing, editorial strategy, email marketing and audience development. Amanda is a co-author of our four digital publishing handbooks.

Co-authored handbooks:

Contact Amanda:

Contact Amanda via email at amanda (at) mequoda (dot) com, @amaaanda, LinkedIn, and Google+.

24 replies on “Email Marketing Tips: 10 Email Feedback Loop Lists”

So… after you get all the feedback loops set up are there any automated feedback loop processing apps… preferably with statistics?

I’m using arpReach and would love to find an app that could automatically receive, process, parse, remove the ban the complainers and then create reports on the email we send.

Right now we are doing it by hand which seems silly.

The problem with the “unsubscribe” option that Gmail provides is that people just don’t use it, just use the Spam button if they don’t want it or even as a delete button.

So without a feedback loop, it is very hard to clean up in mailing lists and avoid getting a bad reputation with Google just because they don’t bother with giving feedback. How does that go with “Do no evil”?

All other major email providers I know of provide a feedback loop, please join in voicing the need for one from Google too and perhaps they will hear us!

The larger principle of leveraging feedback loops isn’t just for email alone. Setting up and embedding processes that monitor and incorporate data from feedback loops is an essential habit in any successful marketing business. In our data-driven era, this can be a source of competitive advantage for disciplined marketing organizations.

Hey there, You’ve done an incredible job. I will certainly digg it and personally suggest to my friends. I’m sure they will be benefited from this web site.

Excelente guia, he particularmente util el JMRP de hotmail. Sin embargo estoy desuscribiendo las direcciones con el primer reporte. Al parecer esto yendo al extremo, un usuario me ha mencionado que marco el correo por error y nosotros lo retiramos de la lista inmediatamente. Como determinar mejor si un usuario debe ser removido de la lista?

Excelent guide, have found truly useful hotmail JMRP. But seems we are acting too fast removing users with one report. One user told me he clicked on the link by mistake and we have removed him from the list inmediately. How do you determine a user must be removed from listing?

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