Hi all,
I will try to explain what happened with the Microsoft FBL signal over the past
year from the Microsoft side.
There were three factors at play
a. We slowly transitioned the traffic away from the legacy Hotmail.com
infrastructure to Office365. Started moving some recipient domains in April
and after multiple steps, validations, spam attacks, we completed the traffic
switch last week. This transition means some domains were seeing the old infra
and some the new infra in varying proportions. Each infra has its own
specifics and bugs, but all legacy font-doors (mx1.hotmail.com) have networking
ACLs since Dec 7th.
b. We addressed the lack of ReportJunk UX/buttons in mobile clients by enabling
"implicit junk reports". We hooked "move to junk folder" signals on the
mailbox side (so it works across all clients, including old ones) and generate
a ARF report on behalf of the user. Around 55% of consumer email sessions are
actually on mobile these days. Hence this provided a boost of signals and the
quality of the signal is very good actually.
c. Over the past year we had few incidents that caused disruption to the feed
(I remember some certificate expired, a huge migration of the big data platform
to Azure Data Lake, other things like that). Non-emergency changes in the
service are introduced via gradual deployments, so this was the cause of some
dips.
The good news is that outlook.com service is fully on the modern stack and
there is visibility in the mobile userbase which actually revealed some new
sets of campaigns: some (spam) senders use the FBL feed to actually prune out
the users that provide ReportJunk feedback (in other words senders do list
cleaning instead of improving their campaigns).
Separately, the assumption that ReportJunk only happens from emails in inbox is
not always true, some users actually reportJunk (if the UX is available) also
from the junk folder. Some users even call support "why did I get this spam
mail in my junk folder" as they want an empty junk folder or not having any
explicit emails or spoofs, etc. This is actually also good signal as it tells
us (and you) that this user really does not want that mail.
Regards,
Mihai Costea
O365 Information Protection
Message: 1
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2017 11:11:47 +0100
From: Stefano Bagnara <mai...@bago.org>
To: mailop <mailop@mailop.org>
Subject: Re: [mailop] Microsoft FBL Increase
Message-ID:
<cahvbj+nexoceo_1frrljsvf4ouzaiasateghjqgwn9fr+2p...@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
On 14 December 2017 at 00:06, Chace Barber via mailop <mailop@mailop.org> wrote:
> Microsoft recently added the ability to report emails as "junk" in mobile
> devices, something not previously available from them. This is resulting in
> many more users being able to report emails as junk than was the case a few
> months ago.
Can you share more about with app/apps (iOS? Android?) introduced the
spam button and what release/s did that?
I can't believe this explain the drop we saw the past april and the
sudden increase we see in the last 2 weeks, but I'd like to
investigate.
We have 3-4x FBL than before, if the reason was the mobile spam button
then it would mean that there are 3x users of the outlook mobile
application compared to the users of the webmail while our open
reports give outlook app a very very low share.
Sure this may be one of the causes, but IMHO there is something else
going on on Microsoft side.
> While getting more complaints may not seem like a good thing this time of
> year, this is an opportunity for senders to get more accurate feedback from
> their subscribers. Listen to what the new mobile users are telling you, and
> you will end up with a more effective email program.
Generating complaints is bad but not receiving notifications for the
complaints is much worse. So I think we are all happy we finally see
much more FBL from microsoft. Furthermore receiving FBLs means email
are delivered to inbox: you don't get abuse reports for email already
in spam. That's why everyone was concerned with low FBL volumes from
Microsoft in the past months. I'm surprised to see how many people
shared this issue but didn't answer to past topic about low/missing
FBL from microsoft in the past months, but I'm happy to see this was a
shared thing (I can't remember how many tickets I submitted to MS
because of this).
Stefano
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