APRF: proposed standard would give senders real inbox-placement data from mailbox providers

A proposed reporting standard called Aggregate Performance Reporting (APRF) drew industry attention in July after deliverability veteran Al Iverson detailed it on Spam Resource on July 19, 2026. The underlying IETF draft (draft-brotman-aggregate-performance-reporting, first published in March 2026) is authored by Alex Brotman of Comcast, Tom Corbett of Iterable and Emil Gustafsson of Google — and, per Iverson's write-up, Comcast is already operating a beta implementation.

How it works

APRF borrows DMARC's discovery mechanism: a domain owner publishes a DNS TXT record naming a reporting address, and participating mailbox providers send daily aggregated reports in JSON. The reports cover message classification — inbox versus spam-folder placement — plus aggregate counts of positive and negative user actions. Structurally it is DMARC aggregate reporting extended from authentication results to placement and engagement.

Why this would be significant

Today, senders who want placement data have two imperfect options: seed tests, which measure a synthetic panel rather than a real audience, and provider dashboards like Google Postmaster Tools or Yahoo's Sender Hub, each proprietary, partial and non-comparable. APRF proposes the missing third option — standardized, real aggregate data driven by actual user behavior, delivered by the mailbox provider itself. For a market that has spent two decades inferring inbox placement from proxies, provider-attested placement reporting would be a structural change, and it would put pressure on the seed-testing industry the same way free provider dashboards already have.

The usual caveats apply: this is an individual-submission draft, not a working-group document, and one provider's beta does not make an ecosystem. DMARC reporting itself took years to reach useful coverage. But the author list — a major US ISP, a major ESP and Google — is exactly the coalition such a standard needs, and Comcast shipping a working beta moves it past the idea stage. Senders already parsing DMARC reports (see our feedback loop explainer for today's complaint reporting channel) should keep an eye on this draft.