Received: from m.wordtothewise.com (fruitbat.wordtothewise.com [208.187.80.135]) by sbh17.songbird.com (8.13.8/8.13.8) with ESMTP id m6CITp3m024236 for ; Sat, 12 Jul 2008 11:29:56 -0700 Received: from [10.0.1.200] (unknown [78.145.130.24]) by m.wordtothewise.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id E9F5380106 for ; Sat, 12 Jul 2008 10:54:18 -0700 (PDT) Message-Id: <658FD885-A321-441E-AEAA-D65F6BD830B9@word-to-the-wise.com> From: Steve Atkins To: ARF mailing list In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v926) X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2008 18:54:16 +0100 References: X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.926) X-Virus-Scanned: ClamAV 0.92/7694/Fri Jul 11 13:39:39 2008 on sbh17.songbird.com X-Virus-Status: Clean X-Greylist: Delayed for 00:35:31 by milter-greylist-4.0 (sbh17.songbird.com [72.52.113.70]); Sat, 12 Jul 2008 11:29:56 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Re: [feedback-report] ARF X-BeenThere: abuse-feedback-report@mipassoc.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.9 Precedence: list List-Id: Public forum for discussion on the feedback-report draft List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2008 18:29:57 -0000 On Jul 12, 2008, at 4:45 PM, Jenny Gavin-Wear wrote: > Hi all, > > I have been researching ARF in relation to the AOL FBL. > > My situation is that I am a web site developer (Coldfusion) offering > hosting and email services to my customers. Some of those customers > are using mail lists. > > My problem is that AOL users incorrectly mark mail list emails as > spam instead of unsubscribing, despite all of the options I have > made available - such as one click unsubscribe. > > So, I need to be able to find the email address of the complainant > from the AOL ARF report. You need to embed the information needed to unsubscribe the recipient in the email you send out. The usual way to do that is to embed some sort of magic cookie which will allow you to identify both the email address the mail was sent to and the list the subscription was associated with (ideally you'd also be able to identify the specific mailing used). This is supported by every decent mailing list manager (not least because you need the same data to handle bounces reliably). > > I am running two mail servers, (Mdaemon and Smartermail) on Windows > 2003 Server Standard. > > On researching a solution for the Windows platform I find nothing. > Worse still, these is very little information on the Net about the > ARF format and on how I might be able to parse it. If you embed a magic cookie in the mail you send out then it's trivial to parse - you don't need to do anything more than pull the message/ rfc822 section out of the mail and look for the cookie. 999 times out of 1000 you don't even need to parse the MIME at all, you can just treat the ARF report as a block of text and look for the magic cookie in that block of text. If you don't include a magic cookie of some sort, and a way of mapping from that cookie back to the original email address, you're making a lot of unneeded work for yourself. Mail::ARF - found here http://wordtothewise.com/resources/arfdeveloper.html - is a simple perl module that will parse and validate an ARF report and make the information (including the included original message) available to a perl script. There's another module in the Email:: space too that'll do similar things. Perl runs just fine on Windows, and that'd be where I'd start if I needed to do a bespoke ARF handler on Windows. > > I would appreciate any information that can lead me to finding a > solution. It would be my intention to make any script I might be > able to create publicly available. > > In your development of ARF as a standard, I would like you to > consider this, and correct me if I am wrong: AOL state that they are > not prepared to provide the email addresses of complainants and will > only provide the message ID of the email that generated the > complaint - from which I can then find the email address. Wouldn't > it be easier to provide the email address in the ARF report in the > first place? This is unrelated to the ARF standard. ARF just describes a simple, consistent MIME format that the data is embedded in. It's just an AOL policy thing. > What could their reasoning be behind their policy? Scomp reports are sent mechanically. It's possible, and not even that unusual, for an scomp report to arrive in the mailbox of someone who was not responsible for the original email being sent, and who does not have legitimate knowledge of the AOL email address that the original mail was sent to. AOL does not give their users email addresses to third parties. By removing the email address from the report AOL is doing basic due diligence to reduce the likelihood that their subscribers email address will be given to a third party who should not have access to it. Any legitimate bulk emailer[1] will have embedded a cookie in their outgoing mail such that they, and only they, can identify the subscriber given access to the cookie. This is annoying to sysadmins, occasionally, when you're sending mail from a badly written webapp or mail is from an individual user and you can't identify the recipient from the scomp report, but that's the tradeoff for helping to ensure that the AOL users privacy is protected to some degree, but it doesn't inconvenience any legitimate sender of bulk email, and they're the recipients of the vast, vast majority of legitimate scomp reports. (Note that I've argued vehemently in the past that this behavior from AOL is Bad and Wrong, but I understand why they do it and their reasoning is quite sane and fairly compelling, even if I don't always agree with it :) ). > > I am also curious as to why the ARF report cannot be viewed using > standard email clients, such as MS Outlook. Can someone please > explain this to me? > ARF is a pretty standard MIME format - it uses a multipart/report format, containing three parts - one text/plain, one message/feedback- report and one message/rfc822. Any standard email client should be able to handle that format just fine. multipart/* is absolutely standard and the only element you need to read to handle the report is message/rfc822. I'm pretty sure that Outlook can read ARF format just fine. If it can't, it's a fairly serious bug. Mail.app renders the text/plain and message/rfc822 parts inline and makes the message/feedback-report section - which is only usually of any use in the case of automated handling of reports - available as a mime attachment. If you want to test for yourself, send an email message to arf-sample@skylist.com and you'll get an ARF formated report about it sent to you immediately - I'd be interested in knowing how Outlook handles that. Cheers, Steve [1] Any legitimate mailer will handle bounces. Any bulk emailer will be sending enough email, and receiving enough rejections and bounces that they can't handle bounces by hand. Magic cookie based approaches such as VERP are the only reliable way to handle bounces mechanically. (That there are a few ESPs who don't do this, and try and intuit from the bounce messages what the associated email address might be doesn't affect the general observation :) ). Received: from mail.fasttrackonline.co.uk (mail.fasttrackonline.co.uk [67.59.38.130]) by sbh17.songbird.com (8.13.8/8.13.8) with ESMTP id m6CGV8xN019763 for ; Sat, 12 Jul 2008 09:31:13 -0700 Received: from 84-43-72-133.ppp.onetel.net.uk [84.43.72.133] by mail.fasttrackonline.co.uk with SMTP; Sat, 12 Jul 2008 16:45:21 +0100 From: "Jenny Gavin-Wear" To: Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2008 16:45:20 +0100 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0047_01C8E43E.ABFFEA40" X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.6604 (9.0.2911.0) X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.3198 Importance: Normal X-Virus-Scanned: ClamAV 0.92/7694/Fri Jul 11 13:39:39 2008 on sbh17.songbird.com X-Virus-Status: Clean X-Greylist: Delayed for 00:45:20 by milter-greylist-4.0 (sbh17.songbird.com [72.52.113.70]); Sat, 12 Jul 2008 09:31:13 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [feedback-report] ARF X-BeenThere: abuse-feedback-report@mipassoc.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.9 Precedence: list Reply-To: jennygw@fasttrackonline.co.uk List-Id: Public forum for discussion on the feedback-report draft List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2008 16:31:14 -0000 This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------=_NextPart_000_0047_01C8E43E.ABFFEA40 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi all, I have been researching ARF in relation to the AOL FBL. My situation is that I am a web site developer (Coldfusion) offering hosting and email services to my customers. Some of those customers are using mail lists. My problem is that AOL users incorrectly mark mail list emails as spam instead of unsubscribing, despite all of the options I have made available - such as one click unsubscribe. So, I need to be able to find the email address of the complainant from the AOL ARF report. I am running two mail servers, (Mdaemon and Smartermail) on Windows 2003 Server Standard. On researching a solution for the Windows platform I find nothing. Worse still, these is very little information on the Net about the ARF format and on how I might be able to parse it. I would appreciate any information that can lead me to finding a solution. It would be my intention to make any script I might be able to create publicly available. In your development of ARF as a standard, I would like you to consider this, and correct me if I am wrong: AOL state that they are not prepared to provide the email addresses of complainants and will only provide the message ID of the email that generated the complaint - from which I can then find the email address. Wouldn't it be easier to provide the email address in the ARF report in the first place? What could their reasoning be behind their policy? I am also curious as to why the ARF report cannot be viewed using standard email clients, such as MS Outlook. Can someone please explain this to me? Thanks in advance, Jenny Gavin-Wear Fast Track Online ------=_NextPart_000_0047_01C8E43E.ABFFEA40 Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Hi=20 all,
 
I have = been=20 researching ARF in relation to the AOL FBL.
 
My = situation is that=20 I am a web site developer (Coldfusion) offering hosting and email = services to my=20 customers.  Some of those customers are using mail=20 lists.
 
My = problem is that=20 AOL users incorrectly mark mail list emails as spam instead of = unsubscribing,=20 despite all of the options I have made available - such as one click=20 unsubscribe.
 
So, I = need to be=20 able to find the email address of the complainant from the AOL ARF=20 report.
 
I am = running two=20 mail servers, (Mdaemon and Smartermail) on Windows 2003 Server=20 Standard.
 
On = researching a=20 solution for the Windows platform I find nothing.  Worse still, = these is=20 very little information on the Net about the ARF format and on how I = might be=20 able to parse it.
 
I = would appreciate=20 any information that can lead me to finding a solution.  It would = be my=20 intention to make any script I might be able to create publicly=20 available.
 
In = your development=20 of ARF as a standard, I would like you to consider this, and correct me = if I am=20 wrong: AOL state that they are not prepared to provide the email = addresses of=20 complainants and will only provide the message ID of the email that = generated=20 the complaint - from which I can then find the email address.  = Wouldn't it=20 be easier to provide the email address in the ARF report in the = first=20 place?  What could their reasoning be behind their=20 policy?
 
I am = also curious as=20 to why the ARF report cannot be viewed using standard email clients, = such as MS=20 Outlook. Can someone please explain this to me?
 
Thanks = in=20 advance,
 
Jenny=20 Gavin-Wear
Fast = Track=20 Online
------=_NextPart_000_0047_01C8E43E.ABFFEA40--