FeedBack Loop Handling

đź’» Development
1

I get the impression that few people using phpList are involved with FeedBack Loops… But for those of you that are running a completely above board mass-mailing system… Read On.

I wrote a very complicated script that handles spam reports received via FBL’s for MS, Yahoo, and AOL.
Without my script, when reports normally come in…

  1. I click the unsubscribe link in each to find out the
    associated email addy.
  2. Then I go into the phpList admin interface and search for the
    addy.
  3. Then I would blacklist the user in a convoluted way.

If I have 5 in a day, it takes 30 minutes… It’s unreasonable and incomplete.

The first thing required is that you are actually part of these FBL’s.

  1. The script retrieves the email from the server.
  2. It preg_match harvests the unsubscribe URL and the $originalsender
    (the addy I sent the original from) from each.
  3. It writes the user_user.uniqueid to a flat file if it’s not a
    duplicate.
  4. It iterates through the flat file removing the user from all mailing
    lists and places them on a special list I created just for
    blacklisted addy’s.
  5. It marks user.user.blacklisted = 1
  6. It sets user_user.modified to 3 hours ago
  7. it creates records for _listuser, _user_blacklist,
    _user_blacklist_data
  8. it sets user_user.extradata and user_blacklist_data.data as
    "Reported $originalsender".
  9. It deletes the flat file.

This is capable of handling 50 in a minute.

The script is real complicated. Would the devs be interested in something like this?.
If so, I can try and work on it so it’s not so specialized to work with my systems.

1 Like
2

Yes, sounds very interesting. It may be useful to make that a separate system, that potentially can call phpList API calls to actually do something. Main issue is, would you want code changes to phpList to make the FBL processing easier?

By the way, you can use an undocumented commandline to process this (that’s what we do in at phplist.com).

php /path/to/admin/index.php -c /path/to/config.php -p blacklistemail -e ${email} -u ${uniqid}

it will take either the email or the “unique ID” to mark the subscriber as a spam complaint.

1 Like
3

Some notifications include the original email in the main body, some include the original email as an attachment.
Does the command line handle both kinds of FBL notifications?

4

I just realized that you mean the command line will blacklist an email user based on the email addy or unique ID and that’s all it would do.
I would still have to retrieve the FBL email, extract the info, and enter the cmd.

So it’s a different convoluted method of blacklisting than the convoluted method I originally mentioned :smile:

5

Hello, NYChris, any chance you could share your script so we can implement that on our phplist server ?

Rgds

lilian