Off Topic: Hotmail

Anthony Cartmell ajcartmell at fonant.com
Sat Oct 13 19:55:10 IST 2007


> Basically it says it has accepted it... but it never arrives...
>
> This applies to roughly 8 out of 10 messages sent to HOTMAIL .

Yup, Hotmail is getting very good at silently deleting e-mails. They're  
accepted for delivery but never arrive. Most annoying if the recipient  
relies on these messages for new contacts: unless they happen to get  
talking via other communication channels no-one knows there's a problem!

> Does anyone have any ideas what I can do to get it to accept my mail!

You need to jump through all sorts of unspecified hoops, it seems, as well  
as some or all of the things specified at
  http://postmaster.msn.com/Guidelines.aspx

The biggest problem I've had is sending messages from web forms. SPF uses  
the envelope sender (my web server) which is OK, SenderID uses the From:  
address (could be anything) which always fails.

I had some response from MS support from using this well-hidden form:
  https://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=edfsmsbl&ct=eformts

and they did something to help my server send mail to hotmail.  But  
messages still often get flagged as being dangerous because SenderID tests  
failed.

The "nice" quote from MS is:
"The troubleshooting steps in this email are recommendations only.
Microsoft makes no guarantees that following these steps will guarantee
deliverability to MSN, Hotmail, or Live.com customers."

I wouldn't mind, if they _told_ me my message wasn't deliverable!

I'm going to try adding a "Resent-From:" header to see if that fixes the  
SenderID problem, but am still researching the implications (I'd only do  
it for hotmail addresses). I don't really want to make my webserver the  
"From" address, it just looks wrong in the hotmail inbox...

Similar mail gets through my filters quite happily, and also gets  
delivered reliably to Google Mail.

Cheers!

Anthony
-- 
www.fonant.com - Quality web sites


More information about the MailScanner mailing list