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[Miles Fidelman <address@concealed>]

Hi Folks,

I've been having a rather annoying problem with one of the vendors who 
provides anti-spam services to ISPs.  More specifically, I have some 
users who confuse their "mark as spam" button with their delete key - 
yielding a slow but steady stream of abuse notices from various ISP 
"feedback loops."

Now, most of these include the message-id - which, coupled with my 
sending setup allows me to identify individual recipients - allowing me 
to take appropriate action.  (You know - "you opted in, if you don't 
want to receive traffic, please leave" followed by "goodbye.")

But... one of the major vendors - Return Path - who provides anti-spam 
services for Comcast redacts not only recipient-id, but message-id - 
making it impossible to track a spam report back to its originator.  
(AOL, Yahoo, etc. are all very good about including message-id).

Note:  I don't expect VERP would be very helpful - the messages aren't 
actually bouncing.  It's the message-id that's critical.

When I inquired about this, the folks at Return Path wrote back:

-----

Thank you for contacting us.

In order to obtain more information about the abusive user, you may 
implement a tracking ID, Please see the information below
that is provided in  the Comcast FAQ page:

"The ISP may redact parts of the original message to protect the privacy 
of their users. In the event an ISP redacts subscriber email addresses 
from their feedback loop messages, you should incorporate a tracking ID 
unique to the recipient's record in your database and your messages so 
that you can process the removals. You can add this ID in the body of 
the message or add an "X" header in the header of the message. An 
example of this could be "X-SenderName-ClientID: 543432".

------

Now, as annoying as this is - I'm stuck with it.  Which leads me to 
wonder:  Is there any easy way to automatically stick some kind of 
identifying information in an X-header?

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Miles Fidelman

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra