Signal Spam as a Feedback Loop Provider for Orange and SFR

Signal Spam is a French non-profit organization founded to battle spam and cybercrime. The organization connects ISPs, ESPs, law enforcement agencies, authorities and internet security vendors to promote solutions that help reduce cybercrime significantly.

Recently, Orange and SFR – providers of free webmail services to more than half of the consumers in France – offered Signal Spam members technical capability to provide senders with statistical feedback concerning email messages their end users marked as spam. At the first glance, it might look like a classic Feedback Loop, which is common for worldwide ISPs, such as Yahoo or Hotmail, however, the mechanism is slightly different.

Due to European laws protecting personally identifiable information senders cannot review complainer’s email address. Orange and SFR provide Signal Spam members solely with aggregated data on the number of complaints issued for messages sent from a given IP. This kind of information gives senders general feedback about how email marketing campaigns are received.

In 2013, ExpertSender joined Signal Spam in an effort to reduce spam distribution from within our network. This partnership resulted in a new functionality available to ExpertSender clients, who can now monitor their daily complaint rates at major French ISPs, which would otherwise be impossible. Since the introduction of this functionality the performance of email campaigns targeting French recipients has improved considerably.

Although Signal Spam provides aggregated statistics, it already proved there is high demand for abuse report metrics available to senders from European-based ISPs. Hopefully, this initiative will soon spread among other local ISPs in Europe. I’m sure all parties involved in electronic messaging would benefit from such a development…