Business 
No Comments Spam Email Feedback Loops
What is a Feedback Loop
Some ISP’s and email providers allow website owners to register into Email Feedback Loops. A feedback loop allows you to register to have emails that users mark as Spam forwarded to a specified email address. Each network requires different levels of information to register. I have registered with Yahoo’s Feedback Loop for all of my websites. I believe that Yahoo requires that you have DKIM set up to register (remember seeing it mentioned, already had it set up, didn’t affect me).
The Painful Truth
What I discovered through signing up for the feedback loop was bothersome. Be aware that you might become extremely frustrated if you sign up for a feedback loop and discover that your users are marking your opt-in emails as Spam. Imagine you run the largest Lost Dogs website in the world and users are marking “found dog added” customized alert notification emails as Spam instead of signing in and modifying their account after their lost dog is returned. Emails from a website that is trying to reunite lost pets, that people signed up for, is being marked as Spam by it’s own users, for no good reason. We’ve had deliverability issues from time to time with Yahoo, most of which have been resolved with the techniques in this blog post. But I would bet that these users recklessly marking emails as Spam contributes to our IP address being marked as a bulk mailer with Yahoo.
Making Lemonade
But you have to take something away from what you find is being marked as Spam. What I noticed was that most of the emails marked as Spam were for lost dog listings from 2008 or earlier. Currently we don’t ever expire alerts, people have to turn them off, but that’s going to change. We just can’t afford to have emails marked as Spam. Now, Yahoo tells you that having one email marked as Spam doesn’t affect you, but with a handful every other day I don’t see how Yahoo isn’t using this information against us. And I’m using this Yahoo feedback loop to extrapolate what is probably happening on other networks which might not be so forgiving.
Here is a list of some feedback loops that you might want to register for. At least register for one of the major ones and get an idea of what people are marking as Spam that you send out.