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The feedback loop module is used to manage feedback loop services offered by many ISPs. Providers like Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, Comcast and others offer this service to qualified senders. The ISP will send a notification email to the sender every time that one of their users clicks on a "This is Spam" or "Report Abuse" type button. Qualified senders are usually required to maintain specific receiving addresses to close the feedback loop such as abuse@domain.com and unsubscribe@domain.com.

This module provides for FBL message processing, original message header processing and log file generation based on the contents of messages.

Warning

If you change the configuration of this module at runtime, you must restart the ecelerity process in order for your changes to take effect. To do this issue the command: /etc/init.d/ecelerity restart .

Configuration

fbl {
  Auto_Log = true # default is "false"
  Log_Path = "/var/log/ecelerity/fbllog.ec" # this is the default
  Addresses = ( "^.*@fbl.foo.com" ) # default is unset
  Header_Name = "X-MSFBL" # this is the default
  User_String = "%{vctx_mess:my_context_variable}" # default is unset
  Message_Disposition = "blackhole" # default is blackhole, also allowed to set to "pass"
  Condition = "can_relay" # default is unset, should be name of a vctx entry
}

This configures the module to catch all mail addressed to the fbl.foo.com domain, process it as an FBL notification message, log it to /var/log/ecelerity/fbllog.ec and then blackhole the message. Outgoing messages will have a custom header injected (in this case named X-MSFBL) with sending information encoded to support later extraction when a feedback loop is triggered.

Addresses

A list of one or more regular expressions defining the mailboxes for receiving FBL reports.

Note

In order to be processed, these addresses must be added to the relay_domains option.

Warning

If a domain in this list also appears in the bounce_domains list, then the incoming FBL complaint message destined to that domain will be logged to both bouncelog.ec (see “The bounce_logger Format”) and fbllog.ec.

Auto_Log

This option defines whether or not to log to the default log file. The default value is false.

Note

In order for header insertion to work, this option must be set to true and the enable_fbl_header_insertion option must be enabled.

Condition

This option should be set to the name of a message context variable. It is used to enable conditional FBL message markup. You can run in 'auto' mode defining which messages are marked up for FBL processing based on which bindings/domains have Enable_FBL_Header_Insertion defined as enabled within their scope. Otherwise you can drive the fbl markup logic through policy scripting by setting the context variable defined in the FBL context variable setting. By default this option is unset.

Header_Name

This option defines the name of the header that the MTA will include encoded information in. The default value for this option is X-MSFBL. By default, this is a base64 encoded string with the following format: rcptlocalpart@rcptdomain@binding@bindinggroup@userstring.

On inbound processing, the MTA will look for the header and extract the data. If the header is not found in the original message, no FBL processing will be performed and the message will be handled per the Message_Disposition setting.

Log_Path

This option defines the log file. The default value is /var/log/ecelerity/fbllog.ec. If you want to aggregate fbl logs on the cluster manager, add fbllog = "/var/log/ecelerity/fbllog.cluster" to the logs dictionary of the cluster module. For an sample configuration see “Centralized Logging with bounce_logger and fbl”.

Message_Disposition

This option is either blackhole to dispose after logging or pass to pass the message on to the Addresses.

User_String

This user-defined string will be included in the logs. The validation connection and message contexts are typical candidates for logging (either pre-defined context values or context values that you define through the Policy Editor). If you want to log a context variable that is not predefined, you will need to use a script to pull that value into the validation context in the each_rcpt phase. The each_rcpt phase corresponds to the EACH RECIPIENT phase in the policy editor.

Note

The user string uses Sieve++-style macros and expands them, while most other custom logging uses custom_logger-style macros which have a different format. For more information on Sieve++, see “Sieve++, Momentum-specific extensions”.

The FBL log

When a user selects "Mark as Spam", then the ISP generates an Abuse Reporting Format (ARF) message and sends it to one of the recipients defined by the Addresses option. When the MTA receives the message in ARF format it then extracts the X-MSFBL header, and decodes and logs it.

Log entries are written to /var/log/ecelerity/fbllog.ec as a single line. An example follows.

1224699438@18/00-02937-E2E6FF84@F@someone@test.com@default@default@abuse@yahoo.com@true

The fields are delimited by @ signs and are described in the following table:

OffsetFieldMeaning
01224699438The date of reception in Unix timestamp format (seconds since 00:00:00 Jan 1, 1970).
118/00-02937-E2E6FF84The message ID.
2FIndicating that this is an FBL entry.
3someoneThe original recipient local part.
4test.comThe original recipient domain.
5defaultThe binding that the message was sent on.
6defaultThe binding group that the message was sent on.
7abuseThe feedback type.
8yahoo.comThe domain the FBL message was sent to.
9trueThe user-defined string.

Note

Not all ISPs use the ARF format. Hotmail uses the "Junk e-Mail Reporting Program" (JMR) but you can still use the fbl module with Hotmail.

However, the JRM format lacks the message/feedback-report MIME part which means that you can't know the feedback type.

Log Rotation and jlog

By default there will be no rotation of the fbllog.ec file. To add log rotation for the FBL log, add it to the /opt/msys/ecelerity/etc/ec_rotate.conf file. For more information about the ec_rotate.conf file see the section called “The ec_rotate.conf File”. The FBL log can be used in conjunction with the jlog module to enable real-time reading of the log by using the following syntax for the Log_Path option:

Log_Path = "jlog:///var/log/ecelerity/fbllog.rt=>master"

For more information about the jlog module see “jlog – The jlog Module”.

fbl Usage

You can select whether to use this module or not by setting the Enable_FBL_Header_Insertion option to enabled or disabled. The Enable_FBL_Header_Insertion option is valid in the global, binding, binding_group and domain scopes. Note that you must also define the fbl module Auto_Log as true in order for header insertion to work.

Enable_FBL_Header_Insertion = disabled

Domain "aol.com" {
   Enable_FBL_Header_Insertion = enabled
}

Binding "foo" {
   Domain "yahoo.com" {
     Enable_FBL_Header_Insertion = enabled
   }
}

Scripting Usage

Lua Scripts

With Lua, FBL scripting is typically implemented by the adaptive module. For more information see Sweep Rules – Configuring Bounce and FBL Behavior.

Sieve Scripts

In the following example, replace abuse@mydomain with your registered fbl address This value can also be a regular expression such as ".*@yourdomain.com". X-MailingID is a selected header identifier, but it can be replaced with anything.

if not header :is "to" "abuse@domain.com" {
  ($Orig_MailingID) = ec_header_get "X-MailingID";
  vctx_mess_set "MailingID" $Orig_MailingID;
}
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